Cloud & Platform Leadership

Hello, I'm Mitchell HouseJackson

Head of Cloud

About

Welcome

I'm Mitchell, a UK-based cloud and platform leader. I run the infrastructure behind a managed learning platform used by more than 250,000 learners across regulated UK clients: roughly 100 production servers, and everything around them. The AWS design, the build pipeline, the observability, the cost, the security. If it touches the platform, I own it.

I got here the long way round. Helpdesk, then Linux at fleet scale, then architecture, and now the whole function. I still write the Terraform myself. Hard to lead a platform you can't run. The detail lives on the work experience page.

250k+ Learners Served All verified in Grafana. I didn't round up.
100 Production Servers Give or take, and all mine to keep alive.
20+ Years on Linux Started on Mandriva at 14. Kernel 2.6. Still no regrets.
4 AWS Regions Observability and DR, wherever the servers live.
Ownership

What I Own

☁️

The Cloud Platform

Multi-account AWS, almost entirely in Terraform, plus the build system that ships it. Onboarding a new client takes one config file, and every tier is built to scale out. We're migrating the estate onto it now.

📊

Reliability & Observability

A Prometheus, Loki and Grafana stack I built myself, with auto-discovery across four regions and on-call wired in. Alerts go to whoever can actually fix the thing.

💷

Cost & Commercial

Someone has to care about the cloud bill, and it turns out that someone is me. I pulled a five-figure monthly spend apart, found the cost wasn't where everyone assumed, and brought it down.

🔐

Security & Risk

Zero-trust access, nothing exposed to the internet that shouldn't be, and every client walled off from the next. I'm also who the board asks about data residency and compliance before signing a regulated client.

Track Record

Selected Impact

  • Designed and built the next-generation hosting platform as multi-account infrastructure-as-code, where onboarding a client is a single config file. Built to scale horizontally; migrating the estate onto it now.
  • Treated the cloud bill like my own money. Pulled a five-figure monthly spend apart and cut it, once I'd worked out what was actually driving it.
  • Got server recovery down to about two minutes with snapshot-AMI promotion. It used to take five times that, with a lot more sweating.
  • Wrote the board briefing on moving data between the UK and New Zealand (the Privacy Act, GDPR, the US CLOUD Act, all of it) that informed a senior-leadership decision on a contract.
  • Built race-safe autoscaling for stateful video servers. Scaling ordinary web nodes is easy; doing it for live calls without dropping anyone is the genuinely hard part, and that bit's mine.
  • Designed and shipped a secure DICOM imaging proxy for an NHS trust: HMAC-scoped, locked to a private subnet, fully audited.
Personal

The Important Stats

The professional stuff is above. Here's what actually matters.

🐧 Desktop Distro Fedora
🖥️ Desktop Environment KDE
🖧 Server Distro Ubuntu
💡 Smart Lights 28
Coffees Per Day 4
🖥️ Monitors 3
⌨️ Keyboard Modified Redragon K551
Tabs or Spaces Tabs. Obviously.
📝 Editor Nano. I will die on this hill.
🐱 Cat 1 Sudo
🐱 Cat 2 Nano

* If the cat called "Nano" can't judge me for not using Vim, neither can you.

Technical

Skills & Expertise

☁️

Cloud & Infrastructure

AWSTerraformProxmoxCloudFormation

View skills

⚙️

DevOps & Automation

CI/CDDockerIaCn8n

View skills

📊

Observability

GrafanaPrometheusLokiOTEL

View skills

🤖

AI & ML

AWS BedrockLangChainn8nLLMs

View skills

🔒

Security

Zero TrustOPNsenseWazuhCrowdSec

View skills

🖥️

Platforms & Apps

MoodleNextcloudMailcowVaultwarden

View skills

🧭

Leadership & Strategy

ArchitectureMentoringStrategyBudget

View skills

🐧

Linux & Systems

UbuntuFedoraBashNetworking

View skills