About

I’m Ben Bolton, an engineering leader based in Holmfirth, West Yorkshire, with 15 years of experience across public sector, gambling, and entertainment industries. My background is in cloud infrastructure, CI/CD platform engineering, and DevOps — with a growing focus on technical leadership and building high-performing teams.

What I Do

I’m currently a Senior DevOps Engineer at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), working at departmental scale on CI/CD platform engineering, artefact management, and AWS cloud infrastructure. Alongside the hands-on technical work, I’ve taken on informal team lead responsibilities — mentoring engineers, coordinating incident response, and bridging engineering teams with stakeholder expectations.

Before that, I spent over six years at Sky Betting and Gaming as an Infrastructure Engineer, where I led projects across on-premises and cloud environments (AWS and GCP). Highlights included migrating squad monitoring onto a containerised Prometheus stack and leading a multi-domain networking solution across the Flutter Group.

Skills & Tools

Cloud, infrastructure, and automation are my bread and butter — primarily AWS, Terraform, GitLab CI/CD, Docker, and Kubernetes. I’ve also worked extensively with HashiCorp Vault and Consul, Prometheus and Grafana, and written a fair amount of Bash and Python along the way.

Background

I came up through apprenticeships, earning Distinctions at both Level 3 and Level 4, and hold certifications including ITIL V3, CCNA, and VMware VCP-DCV. I’m a firm believer in learning by doing — this blog is part of that.

Outside of Work

Rock climbing (bouldering, sport, and trad), ski mountaineering, running, and cycling. I also run a home lab — recent projects include custom PC builds, cloud-hosted VMs, and working through new certifications.

This Blog

Built with Hugo, hosted on Cloudflare Pages. I write about the things I’m learning and working on — infrastructure, automation, and whatever else catches my attention.