Desmond Collins

- Lead DevOps strategy and execution across BDB while providing cross-business support for other BD units (BDX, etc.).
- Oversee DevOps teams spanning multiple business units, driving culture, innovation, and talent development.
- Spearheaded enterprise-wide observability, and security integration (Mend, Fortify, Digicert, Snyk).
- Directed infrastructure for global BD hackathons, enabling internal collaboration at scale.
- Mentor and coach across all levels from junior engineers to staff engineers, encouraging professional growth, resilience, and innovation across technical and non-technical domains.
- Foster a culture of continuous learning, psychological safety, and experimentation, ensuring teams develop both technical depth and leadership capability.

- Transitioned from architect/technical lead into full leadership role, scaling DevOps capabilities across BDB.
- Delivered internal developer portals, alerting systems, and self-service infrastructure to accelerate developer productivity.
- Oversaw migration of legacy applications and infrastructure (SVN, TFVC, IBM RTC) to Git-based modern pipelines.
- Manage multi-million-dollar budgets (€5M annually) to scale automation, infrastructure, and DevOps maturity across the enterprise.

- Provided technical leadership and architecture guidance for BDB while also supporting DevOps initiatives in other BD business units.
- Partnered with adjacent teams to standardize automation, CI/CD practices, and observability approaches across BUs.
- Led cultural and technical adoption of advanced automation practices (robot framework, CI/CD governance).
- Introduced enterprise-wide monitoring/observability with Prometheus and Grafana.
- Guided DevOps talent growth while enabling hands-off leadership transitions.

- Architected and deployed modern DevOps infrastructure: Terraform, Ansible, Docker, Kubernetes.
- Transitioned Artifactory and SonarQube from on-prem to cloud platforms.
- Drove adoption of scalable GitOps practices across development teams.
- Scaled CI/CD pipelines from a handful to hundreds across multiple projects and teams, dramatically accelerating delivery.

- Revitalized a failing SCM function, transforming practices toward infrastructure-as-code, reproducibility, and automation.
- Migrated legacy source control systems (SVN, TFVC) to Git, laying foundation for DevOps transformation.
- Built first standardized pipelines, developer documentation, and reproducible builds.
- Introduced SonarQube adoption to establish code quality and security scanning practices.

I led a geographically distributed team of 17 engineers, supporting a wide array of software projects. In my multifaceted role as Senior SCM Build Engineer, Technical Lead, and SCM Architect, I stayed deeply hands-on while driving strategic initiatives across the software delivery lifecycle.

I served as both the Technical Anchor and Product Manager for a CI/CD team that built a next-generation software platform as part of Project Symphony. I also led build engineering for VCE Vision Intelligent Solutions and defined deployment architecture under the {code} initiative.

The team worked across diverse domains including DevOps, AppOps, LabOps, Automation, Performance Engineering, as well as CI/CD, Continuous Automation, and Release Management. This breadth of expertise enabled us to maintain tight alignment between technical execution and product delivery.

- Managed and mentored a team of 17 engineers, ensuring delivery and professional growth.
- Led technical direction and architecture for application and integration footprints.
- Oversaw release management for:
- Vision Intelligent Operations
- Project Symphony – a fully open-source initiative
- Defined and implemented branching and versioning strategies across languages and codebases.
- Acted as Product Owner and Kanban Coach, prioritizing team backlogs and managing delivery milestones.
- Spearheaded open-source readiness across engineering teams for Project Symphony.
- Advocated for the Symphony community, engaging with external contributors and users.
- Ensured all third-party dependencies were compliant with licensing and legal requirements.

- Established a new team for Software Configuration Management (SCM)
- Project Lead on a new Continuous Integration Platform and Release Automation Platform. (co-ordinated the new instance with help from Dev Architect and Dev leads)
- Migrating version control repositories from legacy systems to new platforms.
- Providing technical guidance and leadership to all teams.
- Planning manual and automated processes around builds and releases.
- Designing and implementing best practices in the SCM Domain.
- Improving the SDLC model with Agile development.
- Researching and developing ideas for new products and production systems.
- Develop and maintain project plans using MS Project.
- Advising the finance department on product purchasing and renewals.
- Ensuring that all agreements, MSA and Non-disclosures, exist with vendors.
- Liaise with security on Password Vaults, application source code, application threat vectors, and code scanning.
- Designing presentations for all platforms, low level, and high level. (Sales pitch of ideas and Vision for SCM and best practices)