Engineers

Robert D. McDonnell

Robert D. McDonnell BSc PhD CISSP

DevSecOps Engineer, technical consultant and owner TUXSOL

Robert learnt to program in Pascal, C, C++ and Shell, and work with unix systems while studying Earth Sciences at Sheffield, Manchester and Utrecht Universities and has been system programming on and off since 1984. He has a doctorate in experimental rock deformation from Utrecht University.

He was an early advocate for Open Source and founded the Utrecht University Linux User Group in 1998 while working as a Post-Doc research scientist.

Between 1999 and 2002 he was Solaris lead trainer and education consultant for Sun Microsystems NL.

From 2002 to 2005 he was employed as a unix Specialist system administrator at Utrecht University (Solaris and Linux), including for the departments of computational linguistics and AI.

He started TUXSOL back in 2000 and has worked as an independent technical consultant, system integrator, system administrator and DevOps Engineer since 2005. He returned to the UK for a year in 2007, working as a midrange technical consultant for the Equifax operations management team as technical lead on a number of service improvement projects.

He has more than four years experience of building wholesale payment channels for the ING bank including the bulk payment channel to the tax office.

Robert has four years experience as lead technical application specialist for sanction scanning of payment traffic (Swift and SEPA) as part of the anti-fraud and sanction team at Rabobank (TAB UNIX).

He has as a further two years experience as a DevOps engineer at the ING bank working in an agile environment, including eight month’s experience as a PKI engineer working on the new SHA-2 root certificate and CA re-platforming migrations in ultra-secure datacenter environments, 3 months trouble-shooting TSAM and a year as Pega 7 lead platform engineer.

Between 2016 and 2019 Robert worked again for the Rabobank as key member of a small radical automation team which fully automated the rollout of new AML systems and then went on to design and build a complete end-to-end CI (build and test) / CD (deploy) pipeline for key scanning systems (AML and Sanction - SWIFT and SEPA) including working closely with the vendor specialists to repackage the software to streamline its fully automated deployment. Furthermore Mac moved a key scanning product from a on-prem cloud POC to a fully cloud MVP in the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

He worked between 2020 and 2022 as a Sr. SecDevOps Engineer for CISO Operations and Intelligence at the ABN-AMRO bank building and deploying a kubernetes (AWS EKS) based Cyber Threat Intelligence platform and building Azure Cloud - Application Security Monitoring (ASM) capability (Azure Log Analytics and Sentinel based).

Robert worked for Achmea for most 2022 deploying and configuring DISA STIG compliant RHEL8 systems in Azure with Terraform and Ansible.

Robert is currently working as a Network Automation Engineer for the ING bank Datacenter Network team on the deployment and configuration of VMware NSX-T using Azure DevOps pipelines and Ansible as part of the next generation private cloud.

He is still playing with Linux and other cool stuff including learning Go and playing with Native Cloud Technologies (k8s). He is a member of the Linux Foundation, NLUUG, NOYB and (ISC)2 professional organizations,

Robert also known as Mac loves gardening, live music, sheds, brewing beer, playing golf, travel (Ireland and Norway) and watching rugby, He is a member of Westport Golf Club, Co. Mayo Ireland and a non-playing member, sometime sponsor, of Pink Panthers rugby football club Driebergen.

Personal Statement

As a hands-on DevSecOps Engineer I have extensive experience in both Agile and project teams maintaining enterprise applications. I help secure, build/test, deploy and run applications and infrastructure that deliver business value. I am product and customer focused. I am analytical, pragmatic and result-driven. I have broad experience within the banking and financial services industry including Sanction and AML transaction monitoring, J2EE middleware, PKI infrastructures, Security and Software defined networking. I am at home with CI/CD pipelines, unix, Linux, Docker, Podman, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, Gitlab, Azure DevOps, Sentinel, NSX-T and more. I learn something new everyday.

As a Coach I can help you build great teams with a DevSecOps mindset, and powerful tools in their hands. I can help your organization become and stay agile, helping your teams have fun, innovate and grow while they deliver quality and deliver often. I know what psychological safety is, why it is important and how to foster it.

As a Technical Consultant I enjoy helping organizations take the right decisions when adopting or improving their DevSecOps way of working. I advocate using loosely coupled, Open Source, Cloud Agnostic tools that have simplicity at their core. I don’t wish to see any organization get locked into a cloud vendor, even organizations with a single cloud provider/partner still have a clear choice to remain as agnostic as possible thereby keeping their options open.