Austin Holdsworth

A cloud and infrastructure solution architect who has successfully designed and delivered HPC, DevOps, PaaS, SaaS & IaaS Solutions, lift and shift VM migrations, digital transformation to microservices architecture, CI/CD and automation. Austin has proven capabilities in network infrastructure, IaC and development and can interface confidently across all disciplines. He has broad experience across various industry verticals and technologies, gaining a deep understanding of secure infrastructure architecture solutions that are fully scalable and highly resilient.

An advocate of agile working practices, capable of leading, mentoring, knowledge sharing and developing skills within highly functional teams.

Cloud HPC Architect at Leeds University (2026-05 – Present)

• Design, build, and deploy a new generation of HPC which leverages both Azure Platform services and existing on-prem HPC resources to provide internal and external customers with a choice of deployment options with appropriate costs for specific workloads through a unified front-door portal and control plane.
• Design HPC for highly secure operations upon TRE (Trusted Research Environment) Levels 3 and 4.
• Environment: Azure DevOps, AKS / Kubernetes, Azure Landing Zone Design, Observability (Grafana), CycleCloud, Slurm HPC, Terraform/OpenTofu, Open OnDemand, Lustre, Infiniband, Linux (Rocky Linux 9), Entra/MFA Authentication

Cloud Transformation Architect at NHS Wales - via TPXImpact (2026-03 – 2026-05)

• Designed a multi-stage roadmap for the transformation of the immunisation system from a static on-prem solution to a micro-services architecture with blue/green deployment capabilities to support modern development techniques.
• High-level and low-level infrastructure design documentation to transform the Master Patient Index for cloud deployment, including lifecycle diagrams, IaC standards, benchmark definitions and build configurations.
• Environment: Microsoft Azure, Azure DevOps, Azure Landing Zones, Web Services, AKS, ADO Branch Strategies, API Management

Cloud & Infrastructure Architect at De Montfort University Leicester (2025-06 – 2026-01)

• Developing cloud and infrastructure solutions aligned with DMU’s £20m digital transformation / cloud-first strategy.
• Validating third-party designs, ensuring partners delivered value against the statement of work, whilst building trusted relationships during delivery phases.
• Oversaw the design and implementation of the Enterprise Landing Zone and the Strategic Data Platform hosted in Azure.
• Environment: Microsoft Azure, Azure DevOps, Orbus Infinity, SAP S/4 Hana, Terraform, Azure Landing Zones

Cloud / DevOps Solution Architect at Uniphar (Ireland) (2024-10 – 2025-04)

• Design and develop Azure and SAP Rise solutions within a programme of work to build a massive, automated warehouse and distribution centre based near Dublin.
• Taking business requirements to generate high and low-level designs. Ensuring governance process lifecycles are engaged through to delivery.
• Working with the DevOps engineering teams to develop robust, secure, highly available and highly performant technical solutions.
• Environment: Azure DevOps, Kubernetes, LeanIX, SAP Basis, EWM, Bicep

Lead Technical Architect at Ministry of Justice (2024-01 – 2024-09)

• Leading a team of technical architects through EA governance to produce technical solutions as part of a programme to deliver a modern workplace environment across the MOJ technical infrastructure.
• Environment: Azure, IP Video, Hyper-V DC, Entra ID / RBAC

Cloud / DevOps / HPC Infrastructure Specialist. at University of Bath (2023-09 – 2023-12)

(Re-hired by the university to continue developing cloud HPC 2.0)

• Designing and delivering a new HPC (High-Performance Computing) research computing cluster hosted in Azure.
• Building the DevOps pipelines to support a continuous delivery approach to development releases.
• Improved performance gains by converting BASH shell scripts to Terraform for landing zone creation, spoke networking and solution infrastructure deployment, such as application gateways, load balancers, storage accounts, MySQL Databases and pre-imaged VMs.
• Automated gold image creation using Packer and Ansible.
• Move base OS from CentOS 7.8 to AlmaLinux 8 and Cyclecloud 8.5.0 from 8.2.2
• Environment: Azure DevOps, Docker, AKS / Kubernetes, Azure Container Services, BASH Scripting / AZ CLI, Azure Landing Zone Design, Observability (Telegraph / InfluxDB / Grafana), CycleCloud, Slurm HPC, Ansible, Chef, Packer, Terraform, Open OnDemand, Lustre, Infiniband, YAML, Linux (CentOS /Almalinux 8), API Management, Blue Green / Federation

DevOps / Landing Zone Automation. at Platform Smart (2023-07 – 2023-09)

• Automated and secure implementation of private endpoints, Key Vaults, load balancers, Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) and storage accounts.
• Designed a DevOps capability for an application landing zone “spoke vending machine” approach.
• Demonstrated and documented a handover to the end client with a period of support. HLD and DLD Design documentation with Visio Diagrams.
• Environment: Azure DevOps, Powershell, AZ CLI, Azure Landing Zone Design, Terraform, Bicep, Visio / Draw.IO, Private endpoints, Key Vaults, Storage Accounts, AVD

DevOps / Landing Zone Creation. at Fujitsu & the National Physics Laboratory (2023-05 – 2023-07)

• Developed a remote access solution for 28 communications firms to collaborate on a major UK government security initiative known as the UK Telecommunications Lab.
• Designed, coded and deployed a large hub and spoke VNET hybrid network solution using VPN gateways, firewalls, and an Enterprise Landing Zone policy topology using infrastructure as code.
• Delivered using Azure DevOps pipelines and Bicep with an automated approach to creating new vendor remote access spokes.
• Environment: Azure, Azure DevOps CI/CD, Bicep, VMWare, PowerShell, M365, AD / IAM/ RBAC, Logic Apps, Application Gateway

Modernisation and Transformation Review. at Pearson Education via Nimbus DTI (2022-12 – 2023-03)

• Delivered an Architectural review of the legacy estate against a revised roadmap to modernise and transform applications and services to hybrid and cloud-native platforms hosted on Nutanix and AWS.
• Revised DevOps capabilities and modernisation approach with a strategic roadmap.
• Hosted workshops with senior business stakeholders to develop a business capability mapping to TOGAF style model creation and taxonomy review.
• Cost analysis and optimisation against the revised roadmap.
• Environment: AWS, EKS, DevOps (GitLab), Nutanix, Powershell, M365, AD / IAM, Visio

Cloud / DevOps / HPC Infrastructure Specialist. at University of Bath (2021-11 – 2022-09)

• Designing and delivering a new HPC (High-Performance Computing) research computing cluster hosted in Azure.
• Building the DevOps pipelines to support a continuous delivery approach to development releases and landing zone creation.
• Develop highly resilient research computing solutions using HA load balancing, parallel storage, and federated clusters.
• Develop cost-effective scaling methods which leverage the flexibility of on-tap cloud resources with continuous blue-green delivery using Azure DevOps pipelines.
• Maximise institutional gains from pursuing a cost-optimised cloud adoption strategy, particularly in areas such as storage and compute resources.
• Deliver a universal access portal for remote visualisation and account management.
• Environment: Azure DevOps, Docker, AKS / Kubernetes, Azure Container Services, BASH Scripting / AZ CLI, Azure Landing Zone Design, Observability (Telegraph / InfluxDB / Grafana), CycleCloud, Slurm HPC, Ansible, Chef, Packer, Terraform, Open OnDemand, Lustre, Infiniband, YAML, Linux (CentOS /RHEL), API Management, Blue Green / Federation

Cloud Migration Architect / DevOps SRE at Collinson Group (2020-07 – 2021-09)

• Responsible for designing the Azure landing zones and leading the eventual migration and transformation of the shared services and DevOps Tooling from a VMWare-based data-centre environment. Developed the integration with mature customer-facing AWS services and a greenfield Card Data Environment as part of a PCI DSS critical tokenisation project.
• Successfully migrated 100+ dependencies to PaaS, SaaS and IaaS offerings using a mixed toolchain of Azure Migrate, VMware appliance and site recovery services for staging and replication.
• Representing the project within the architecture community to shape the framework, develop the migration approach, and gain approval to build.
• Led the Security initiative in the design, procurement and implementation of compliance automation policy and assessment reporting.

BSc in Information Systems for Business (Hons) – Leeds Met. University (1996 – 1996)

HND in Computing – University of Humberside (1994 – 1994)