Alex Thorne
IT Operations Manager
For the last ten years I’ve committed myself to leading my Product line’s IT Operations to success. I’m a process specialist with a continued record of establishing efficient, sustainable process areas and highly performant teams. I’m an experienced leader adept at cultivating effective team dynamics and healthy organizations. I’m a seasoned communications expert with experience in developing and conveying strategy. I’m committed to service excellence and delivering phenomenal customer care. And I’m a dedicated team member with a strong sense of ownership.
- Website
- https://alexthorne.site
- alexanderthorne
- GitHub
- alex-thorne
Experience
– present
Head of Section: M7 Gas & Observability at Deutsche Börse
Section lead heading two new products: M7 Gas, a next-gen trading platform for EU’s primary Gas market and M7 Observability, an in-house PaaS offering for scalable observability services. Formed a platform engineering team to provide the supporting infrastructure platform leveraging GCP’s GKE
Highlights
- Led R&D and Business Development of the M7 Observability Product
- Led Cloud Migration project from AWS and on-prem hosting to GCP
- Launched our division’s first Products to reach fully compliant status (KRITIS) running material workloads on Google Cloud Platform
- Led the transition to a GitOps approach for Continuous Delivery of infrastructure and software
– present
Head of Operations: Energy IT at Deutsche Börse
Head of Operations for the M7 product line, Europe’s premier power-spot trading platforms delivering highly performant, highly reliable services 24/7. Responsible for defining operational strategies and service design and leading teams of highly skilled DevOps engineers and service management specialists committed to ensuring our Products’ continued service excellence.
Highlights
- Lead migration to build up an in-house Operations department from previous insourced and outsourced services.
- Co-led the shift from a waterfall-driven to a product-based Agile organization, utilizing LeSS, Scrum, and SRE/DevOps principles to create a series of products managed by cross-functional, highly autonomous delivery teams.
- Expanded my team from 6 to 27 direct reports from 2017 to 2023, amidst a 10x surge in daily market activity, while maintaining system performance and improving availability from under 99.8% to a consistent 99.99% annually.
- Refactored customer agreements and Release Management processes to achieve continuous delivery of our software production.
- Developed a scalable, lean service management process by harmonizing service agreements, consolidating input streams and introducing the role of "Business Operations" to manage service delivery.
- Served as the asset owner for the infrastructure fleet and all third-party vendor services, managing a corresponding $5 million budget.
– present
Developer in Test / Test Lead, M7 Trading Solutions at Deutsche Börse
Responsible for test automation, development and maintenance of test tools, test planning, test management and coordination, non-functional systems testing, networking and systems administration, integration and deployment processes.
Highlights
- Main contributor to our department’s first fully automated GUI test suite (Selenium WebDriver for Java)
- Built and maintained a series of VirtualBox images to allow for local testing by our test team
- Lead initiative for adoption of Cucumber as an test modeling approach for QA and Customer UAT
Volunteer
–
Educator at The Nature And Biodiversity Conservation Union Germany
Voluntary Ecological Year (FÖJ). Worked as part of NABU to maintain a centern for environmental education in Landau-Mörzheim, Pfalz, Germany. Led guided nature tours and workshops for school classes of all ages and other groups. Worked to maintain a series of organic vineyards and orchards owned by the NABU organization.
Highlights
Education
–
Bachelor in Spatial Arts, San Jose State University
Languages
- English
- Fluency: Native speaker
- German
- Fluency: Professional working proficiency
- Czech
- Fluency: Elementary proficiency
Interests
- Long distance running, cycling, music, board games.
- Keywords:
