Ciaran McCrisken
Software Developer

About

Experienced software engineer who prides themself on collaboration, helping others, constant self improvement, and quick learning. Took a non-traditional route into software engineering, gaining considerable knowledge in security, networking, DevOps and QA along the way.

Work Experience

Puppet
https://www.puppet.com
April 2021 – Present
Senior Software Engineer
Worked on the Developer Experience (DevX) team, helping to design and implement functionality into the next generation of the Puppet Developer Kit (PDK). Also responsible for more than a dozen open source tools covering testing, linting, templating, and other development tasks. Mentor to placement student.
Highlights
  • Reduced CLI cmd exec time from > 10 secs to < 100 ms rewriting PDK from Ruby -> Go
  • Pre-releases averaging once per month; fast feedback loop from interested stakeholders
  • New container based architecture for Phase II
October 2019 – March 2021
Intermediate Software Engineer
Worked on the Infrastructure Automation Content (IAC) Team helping to maintain, support, test & release Puppet’s supported modules. Maintained and enhanced critical tooling used internally at Puppet and externally by Open Source Community. Mentor to placement students and junior members of the team.
Highlights
  • Primary maintainer of popular & critical Apache module; designed & implemented a way to simplify the complex test requirements
  • Key to testing, certifying and releasing modules for Puppet 7’s release
  • Automated team's weekly statistics and reports blog
Rapid7
https://www.rapid7.com/
November 2018 – October 2019
Senior Software Engineer
Extending the capabilities of Rapid7’s InsightIDR SIEM platform. Performed frequent releases of on-prem and cloud native components.
November 2016 – November 2018
Senior Security Researcher / SW Engineer (+ Team Lead)
Extending and maintaining the Ruby based automation infrastructure that generated vuln check definitions for InsightVM. Extending the functionality of the InsightVM product (Java, Jess). Researching and authoring vuln checks for critical, newly announced CVEs, ensuring rapid turnaround of safe, accurate checks in the InsightVM product for customer detection / remediation. Participating in Rapid7’s PCI annual approved vendor certification process. Responsible for ensuring coherent QA strategy within the team, reviewing and improving QA processes. Mentor to placement students and more junior team members.
June 2014 – December 2015
Software Engineer in Test II
Development and maintenance of automation tooling, CI/CD pipelines and build scripts for Rapid7’s Nexpose/InsightVM product. Development and execution of test plans for new functionality (extending automated coverage, manual / exploratory testing). Primary release lead for Nexpose/InsightVM on-prem in GMT timezone.
Vello Systems
https://web.archive.org/web/20140521102553/http://vellosystems.com/
August 2013 – May 2014
QA Lead
Managed a team of three QA engineers, helping to build out a new Python based automation framework for Vello’s new SDN platform, in addition to maintaining and expanding on the existing test harnesses for their established optical and Ethernet network hardware.
Replify
https://www.replify.com/
August 2010 – August 2013
QA/Support Engineer
Responsible for maintaining and expanding automated test framework and infrastructure. Devising and executing test plans against Replify’s Accelerator product suite. Maintenance of IT infrastructure. Provisioning demo environments for Sales team, configuring customer deployments (on site and remote). Day-to-day maintenance of IT infrastructure (30+ Dell Poweredge servers running VMWare ESXi). Primary contact for customer support queries for Replify's products. On site and remote installation and configuration of Replify's Accelerator product in to critical network infrastructure.
Worldcast Systems Group (APT)
https://www.worldcastsystems.com/
June 2008 – August 2010
Customer Support Engineer
3rd line technical support for APT’s range of audio codecs. Remote and on-site debugging, repair, installation and configuration of equipment into zero downtime broadcast environments. Diagnosis, repair and soak testing of faulty equipment, including replacing board components. Authored quick start guides for use by customers and internal technical sales dept. Set up and tear down of demo booths at trade shows.

Contact

Belfast, Northern Ireland
Github
sanfrancrisko
LinkedIn
ciaran-mccrisken-ba462621

Education

Skills

Coding (years exp)
Ruby (7) Java (3) JESS (3) Puppet (3) Python (1) Go (1)
Scripting (years exp)
Unix Shell (10) Perl (2) Powershell (1) Escript (1)
Build, CI/CD
Github Actions Goreleaser Jenkins Spinnaker TeamCity
Cloud/Virtualisation
AWS Docker Google Cloud Terraform Vagrant Virtual Box VMWare ESX/vSphere/Fusion
IDEs/Editors
IDEA IDEs nano Subline Text VSCode vi/vim
Monitoring/Observability
Datadog Honeycomb
Security/Compliance
Metasploit nmap PCI DSS compliance SIEM Logging
Test Frameworks
Cucumber JMeter JUnit RSpec Sikuli
OSs
Linux macOS Unix (AIX, HP-UX) Windows

Interests

Music
Piano Guitar Composition Recording Production
Green Tech
Renewable Energy Sustainability Smart Electricity Usage EVs