NICHOLAS TOWERS : CURRICULUM VITAE

PERSONAL DETAILS
Full Name : Mr. Nicholas Charles Edward Towers MEng ACGI
Address : <Removed from on-line version - please e-mail if required>
Phone : <Removed from on-line version - please e-mail if required>
E-mail : nick@nicktowers.net
Date And Place Of Birth : 24 / 05 / 1978, Beverley, East Yorkshire, UK
Nationality And Marital Status : British, Single

OVERVIEW
Goal : A challenging systems management position where I can utilise my technical background.
Availability : From January 2006. Willing to relocate and/or travel as needed within the UK or abroad.
Experience : Extensive system architecture design and operational experience along with four years managing a systems infrastructure team in a mission critical environment. Exposure to different countries and varied corporate environments including investment banking and a startup from conception through to profitability.
Skills : Background in UNIX and Windows systems (particularly Linux and Solaris) systems and network design, configuration and administration, and software engineering. Skilled in team management, leadership and project management and strong presentation and communication abilities.
Education : Exceptional academic record including a first class Masters computing degree from Imperial College London and all top grades at Advanced Level.

HIGHER EDUCATION
Institution : Imperial College, University of London, UK (1996 - 2000)
Course : Computing MEng
Degree classification : I (First Class Honours)
Accreditations : Associateship to the City and Guilds Institute (ACGI). Exemptions towards British Computer Society (BCS), Institute of Electrical Engineers (IEE) and Chartered Engineer (CEng).
Awards : "Top Flight" bursary from the Engineering Council for outstanding examination success. First prize in an undergraduate programming competition. Masters thesis given "distinguished project" award.
Third year group project : Navigation with remotely controlled "intelligent" robots.
Final year individual project (Masters thesis) : Design and implementation of a generalised API for application control by telephony devices.

SECONDARY EDUCATION
Institution : Hymers College, Hull, UK (1985 - 1996)
Advanced Level (A-Level) : Economics - A, General Studies - A, Mathematics - A, Physics - A
Advanced Supplementary Level (AS-Level) : Computing (Information Technology) - A
Awards : Outstanding examination success awards for GCSE and A-level. First team colours.
Duke Of Edinburgh Gold Award Scheme : Towards this was chess captain for my school as well as representing Hull and Yorkshire; volunteer counsellor at a residential camp for people with blindness; helped lead a four day canoeing expedition in the Algonquin National Park in Canada; gained a number of first aid and lifeguard qualifications.

SKILLS AND KNOWLEDGE AREAS

• Background in UNIX systems and networking infrastructure for Internet systems. This has developed through the use of computer and communication systems over the past fifteen years and through my interest in the underlying protocols and architectures. Have project management experience and knowledge of the software development process and also significant exposure to areas such as risk analysis, failure planning and disaster recovery policy design and implementation.
• Have gained valuable insight into the use of open source software in corporate environments and the support, maintenance and legal issues that arise. Have experience of a number of different programming languages including C, C++, Java, HTML/XML/XSLT, UNIX shell, Perl, SQL and many vendor specific technologies.
• A mind for technical detail and an ability to pick up ideas quickly have enabled me to adapt my knowledge to new situations. Have the ability to develop logical conclusions from reasoned discussions, and to explain technological concepts and developments to people with non-technical backgrounds. Capable of working to budgets and deadlines, and of prioritising issues in accordance with business needs whilst managing those around me.
• With exposure to an investment bank and an oil trading industry startup have built up an understanding of financial trading systems and the reliability, availability and monitoring that these industries require due to the value of their transactions and the regulatory frameworks they operate within.

WORK AND EXPERIENCE
OILspace, London and Moscow (Autumn 2000 - Spring 2005)

• Head of systems infrastructure group (from late 2001, previously senior systems administrator) reporting directly to senior management. Based in Moscow from April 2002, London previously. Designed and implemented a fully redundant secure production infrastructure to run an Internet based oil industry trading, news delivery and back office risk analysis and reconciliation platform.
• Established and lead the ten person infrastructure team and represented them to the company. Created a support environment to provide a web based system with "four nines" availability. In addition to full responsibility for all production systems and disaster recovery issues the role included management of the release process for the extreme programming based development team (40 Java/J2EE developers) and architectural input on the companies software design evolution. Responsible for the teams hiring and personnel reviews and for creating and meeting our annual budgets.
• Gained in depth knowledge of real time market data distribution and private data feeds and into the architecture and design of high availability Internet based systems. Developed a strong understanding of the business needs in high value trading environments and in the downstream oil/gas sector. Setup and supported the office systems infrastructure in London, New York, Moscow, Singapore and Dubai.
• Technologies used in production included Linux/x86 (Red Hat Enterprise Server, over 100 machines), Solaris/SPARC, IPsec, Veritas Volume Manager, Cluster Server and NetBackup, Oracle, Cisco IOS (including multihomed routing) and PIX firewalls, Network Appliance file servers, F5 load balancers/SSL accelerators, BIND (DNS), NTP, Apache, Nagios, mrtg/SNMP and secure shell. Office infrastructure also included the use of Windows 2000/XP, Samba, DHCP, wireless ethernet, VoIP, CVS, Mailman and Postfix.
• Having joined at the formative stages of the company I benefited from exposure to all aspects of the initial development and fruition of the companies business case, product developments and brand creation. Through the move from London to Moscow gained experience of "offshore" outsourcing.

Department of Computing, Imperial College, London (Summers 1998/2000)

• Network and systems administrator in the systems division which manages around 60 UNIX/Windows servers, 400 workstations and a number of HPC clusters. Projects included conversion of the laboratories from SUNOS to Linux, investigation of developing Linux support for 802.3ae ethernet link aggregation, deployment of gigabit and 802.11b wireless ethernet, a remote serial console service and the design for a replacement redundant architecture for the SUNSite Northern Europe archive.
• Detailed experience of automated Linux, Solaris and Windows administration was gained as well as Extreme Networks and Cyclades equipment configuration. Have been consulted since leaving for advice on their infrastructure developments.

Deutsche Bank, London (Summer 1999)

• Based in the City of London for the six month industrial placement part of my degree course. Project was to gain Y2K certification for a highly distributed AIX based market data system which supplied real time foreign exchange pricing to traders and retail branches.
• The systems were located in Frankfurt and I travelled there frequently. Gained team working, time and project management experience and exposure to an investment banking environment along with skills in QA processes, UNIX administration, C/C++ debugging and source and revision control.

Dramatic Society, Imperial College Union, London (1996 - 2000, part time)

• Key member of the technical support team involved with cultural shows, theatre productions and events which generated a budget of approximately 30k gbp pa through subcontracting its services throughout the College. Elected to positions of lighting director for second and third year of my studies and president in my final year.
• Organised and managed the lighting for balls at Alexandra Palace for over 1000 people. Gained budgetary, team working and project management experience with the president position in particular acting as an intermediary with other College stakeholders.

Hull City Council Sports Development (Summers 1996/1997)

• Introduced underprivileged children to outdoor sports and pursuits for the leisure services division.

HOBBIES AND INTERESTS

• I play cricket and take part in various outdoor sports, especially snow boarding. I like driving cars and motorbikes and follow motorsport.
• I continue to be interested in event management and technical support and follow developments in computer architectures and technology.
• I enjoy travelling and have visited more than 50 countries, including a recent (Summer/Autumn 2005) tour of South and Central America.

REFERENCES
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