Jamie Dale
Summary
Accomplished Senior Engineer with 8 years of experience in enterprise-scale observability, security monitoring, and data platform solutions for financial services. Expertise in Splunk Enterprise, Splunk ITSI, and Kafka, focusing on architecting high-availability platforms and driving performance optimisation. Proven ability to develop critical dashboards, implement extensive data integrations, and enhance operational resilience while effectively engaging stakeholders and leading technical initiatives.
Overview
9
9
years of professional experience
Work history
Security Engineer
Morgan Stnaley
Glasgow
2024.02 - Current
- Acted as the top-level escalation point for complex troubleshoots of the Splunk platform, driving root cause analysis and remedial actions.
- Mentored other engineers through knowledge sharing and collaboration.
- Sustaining engineering of Splunk to ensure the platform is performant and highly available: Upgrading Splunk version, performing DR testing, improving backup processes, and performance testing new features.
- Created Ansible & Python tooling to assist with the deployment of Podman containers required for new Elasticsearch platform allowing rapid deployment of new clusters or configuration changes to existing ones.
- Implemented SAML authentication for Elasticsearch platform enabling RBAC and single sign-on.
- Setup GitHub Actions to enable continuous integration and deployment of changes along with publishing new Podman images to internal container registry.
Splunk Developer
HSBC
Remote work
2023.09 - 2023.12
- Created incident dashboard that is now used by major incident management team
- Recommended improvements to current ITSI implementation
- Modelled important business services within ITSI
Splunk Developer
NatWest Group
Remote work
2022.09 - 2023.09
- Modelled multiple data platforms (StreamSets & Kafka) within Splunk ITSI
- Reworked a large number of dashboards to improve usability and performance
- Onboarded data using file monitoring, HEC & Linux TA according to Splunk best practices
- Led Splunk training for end users
- Moved capacity management for all important business services to Splunk.
Security Engineer
Morgan Stanley
Glasgow
2018.06 - 2022.09
- Sustaining engineering of Splunk to ensure the platform is performant and highly available: Upgrading Splunk version, performing DR testing, improving backup processes, and performance testing new features
- Optimized search performance of Splunk platform through improved load balancing of data to indexers and evening out execution of saved searches across the day to reduce spikes in CPU and therefore being able to increase the number of batch mode search pipelines
- Provided junior members of the team with support/training via ad hoc meetings, documentation, and internal blog posts
- Engineered Kafka Connect ingestion tier between Kafka and Splunk
- Acted as an escalation point to assist with the resolution and remediation of production incidents in both the Splunk & Kafka plant
- Assisted users with SPL, optimization of queries and dashboards
- Assisted other members of the team with data on-boardings to ensure best practice was followed
- Designed & implemented changes required to ensure configuration/code changes are deployed in a continuous and secure manner to the Splunk platform
- Carried out a proof of concept and performance test of Splunk SmartStore / Dell ECS object store
- Performed a full review of our Kafka plant and delivered multiple presentations detailing suggested improvements / best practices
- Engineered a bi-directional Kafka mirror maker 2 solution to bring Azure logs on-prem and send on-prem logs to Azure
- Engineered a Kafka mirror maker 2 solution to bring in logs from Kafka clusters spanning multiple data centers
SOC Analyst
Clydesdale Bank
Glasgow
2017.02 - 2018.06
- Supported Incident Response team during critical incidents to mitigate threats
- Used available tools to identify anomalous activity on the network
- Responded to and investigated events of interest on the network
- Tuned toolset to enhance detection capabilities and improve incident response
- Built partnerships with the threat intelligence team for proactive threat management
- Identified automation opportunities to streamline manual processes and reduce response time
- Selected to work on configuring the F5 WAF for CYBG’s brochureware sites
Education
Bachelor of Science - Computer Science
University of Glasgow
Glasgow /2012 - /2016
Skills
Splunk - knowledge of deploying, engineering and operating a Multisite Splunk platform with 160 servers Proficient in SPL & dashboard development including enhancing functionality via JavaScript
Elasticsearch - Experience building and configuring large deployments of the ELK stack
Kafka - experienced in deploying, operating and troubleshooting both Kafka brokers and Kafka Connect
Ansible - considerable experience writing complex Ansible playbooks, developing plugins and writing new Ansible modules I've delivered multiple internal training sessions on Ansible
Terraform - experience using Terraform to create and configure resources within Azure
Python - experience in developing larger applications and smaller scripts while at Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and CYBG
Java - extensive experience developing applications in Java Both my university team project (Creating a Go problem solver) and individual project (Algorithms for matching students to projects) were developed using Java I have also written applications in Java during my time at CYBG & Morgan Stanley
Splunk Courses
- Architecting Splunk 8.0.1 Enterprise Deployments
- Implementing Splunk SmartStore 7.3
- Troubleshooting Splunk Enterprise 8.0
- Advanced Search & Reporting 8.0
Timeline
Security Engineer
Morgan Stnaley
2024.02 - Current
Splunk Developer
HSBC
2023.09 - 2023.12
Splunk Developer
NatWest Group
2022.09 - 2023.09
Security Engineer
Morgan Stanley
2018.06 - 2022.09
SOC Analyst
Clydesdale Bank
2017.02 - 2018.06
Bachelor of Science - Computer Science
University of Glasgow
/2012 - /2016