Hello!

I’m Ashley Poole, an experienced engineering leader with a passion for driving innovation and excellence in technology teams. With a versatile background across product engineering, platform engineering, site reliability engineering (SRE) and operations, this allows me to bring a diverse & unique approach to problem solving and the product development lifecycle.

During my time within engineering management, I’ve had the privilege of both building, working with and coaching high-performing product engineering teams, working on a diverse range of products, both greenfield and brownfield in nature.

In the realm of product engineering, I’ve contributed to the creation of innovative solutions, from concept to market launch, working in different environments such as start-ups, scale-ups and enterprise organisations. My experience in this field has equipped me with the skills to guide teams of all maturities through the complexities of product development, ensuring they efficiently deliver incremental value to customers.

Platform engineering is another area where I’ve left my mark. I’ve been instrumental in designing and optimising technical platforms, enabling organisations to scale operations seamlessly and foster a culture of continuous improvement through initiatives such as Infrastructure as Code (IaC) utilising technologies including Terraform and PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC).

SRE is a area close to my heart. Having previously build and lead SRE teams, as well as SRE charters and guilds, I’ve been able to demonstrate the importance of SRE with a customer orientated view in order to ensure the reliability, performance, and scalability of critical systems, leading teams to achieve higher uptime and customer happiness through improvements to architecture, observability, test automation and incident management. In the space of incident management, i’ve designed, implemented and trained out incident response plans, as well used ChatOps principals to build a SlackBot to automated and guide users through the process when issues occur.

SRE Spoiler; Fail fast, build for failure and keep the customer at the heart of everything you do!

I’m passionate about sharing knowledge and have had the honor of speaking at conferences such as NDC Minnesota and engaging with various user groups, as well as previously co-running a user group myself called Shropshire Devs. Additionally, I’m a proud contributing author to the book ‘97 Things Every SRE Should Know’ where I’ve shared my insights into best practices in SRE relating to life as a solo SRE.

Sound like I can help, have an interesting opportunity which might fit my skill set, or simply interested to chat? Drop me a line on LinkedIn or Email.