Profile

Sarah Gibson is a Platform Engineer with seven years’ experience in Kubernetes and cloud environments. She builds robust systems for research and education, and has supported public infrastructure for sharing environments.

Professional Experience

• 2i2c: The International Interactive Computing Collaboration · Remote, UK
• Open Source Infrastructure Engineer · Jun. 2021 - May 2025
• Designed and deployed infrastructure across multiple cloud vendors using Infrastructure-as-Code principles with Terraform, reducing provisioning time for new client services to under one day.
• Developed a Python-based application to create and manage Google Filestore backups, ensuring all clients on GCP infrastructure maintained up-to-date backups of critical data. [blog]
• Automated the build of containerised software environments from version control using Docker and GitHub Actions, enabling researchers to self-serve and customise their own environments efficiently.
• Designed an intelligent CI/CD pipeline using Python logic to create dynamic upgrade strategies that targeted only necessary infrastructure, reducing pipeline runtimes, isolating application upgrades, and increasing confidence in deployment workflows. [blog|talk]
• Built core functions for a central Python utility library to automate DevOps tasks, boosting efficiency. [repo]
• Collaborated effectively within a globally distributed, agile team, driving progress across time zones and disciplines.
• Led end-to-end development and delivery of new product features, from scoping stakeholder needs to successful launch.
• Collaborated with stakeholders to gather requirements and architect scalable, user-centric solutions aligned with operational and business goals.
• Delivered high-quality operational support, resolving incidents and addressing customer issues in a high-availability environment.
 
• The Alan Turing Institute · London, UK
• Research Software Engineer · Nov. 2018 - May 2021
• Designed Helm configuration and a CI/CD pipeline to deploy a customised JupyterHub to Azure Kubernetes Service, enabling researchers access to datasets stored in cloud object stores.
• Developed Ansible configurations to reliably and reproducibly provision infrastructure for a machine learning competition platform, accelerating the platform’s development and deployment process.
• Wrote a Python CLI tool to compare file content hashes and identify duplicate files in large data dumps, automating cleanup and ensuring researchers had access to clean, de-duplicated datasets.
• Built a Python tool to extract keyword-based image snippets from OCR text, powering content generation for a large-scale crowdsourcing effort in a multi-million-pound digital humanities project.
• Built and automated computational infrastructure and data pipelines, performed data wrangling and analysis, and delivered insights through clear documentation, technical reports, presentations, and blog posts.
• Led the end-to-end delivery of research software projects, applying best practices in software engineering—including version control, modular design, and testing—to ensure maintainability and reproducibility.
• Collaborated closely with researchers and stakeholders across the Turing network to develop software solutions for data-intensive research aligned with Turing Challenge Areas.
• Managed projects from inception to delivery, coordinating across multidisciplinary teams to align technical implementation with research goals.

Voluntary Experience

• The Turing Way · Remote, UK
• Infrastructure Working Group Co-Lead · Sep. 2022 - Present
• Designed strategic infrastructure roadmaps outlining project goals and requirements, establishing a single source of truth to guide decision-making and priority setting.
• Introduced agile workflows into core working group operations, enhancing visibility, accountability, and ownership of tasks while enabling strategic focus on long-term goals.
• Assessed and prioritised team activities to maximise impact and drive progress toward the group’s strategic objectives.
• Co-leads a cross-functional working group, contributing to strategic direction, operational management, and the successful onboarding of new members.
• Maintainer · Nov. 2018 - Sep. 2022
• Created content on computational reproducibility, delivering structured tutorials to over 6,000 monthly users and supporting widespread skill development.
• Designed and facilitated workshops on computational reproducibility at multiple conferences, training hundreds of researchers across diverse domains to integrate reproducible practices into their work.
• Developed an automated test suite in Python and Bash to verify links, enforce style guides, and control file size, ensuring site integrity and maintainable repo size.
 
• JupyterHub · Remote, UK
• Maintainer · Apr. 2019 - May 2025
• Recognised as a Jupyter Distinguished Contributor in 2022 for significant contributions to the Jupyter ecosystem and advancing open-source initiatives.
• Secured a $10K infrastructure grant from the Alan Turing Institute to add a federation member to mybinder.org, increasing the platform’s capacity to host reproducible computational environments and support global research and education.
• Administered federated Kubernetes clusters across multi-cloud environments to deliver a public platform for sharing reproducible computational environments, supporting over 140,000 weekly launches as of Q2 2020.
• Authored technical documentation for deploying BinderHub to Azure, transforming an under-documented setup into a clear, user-friendly guide.
• Automated and parallelised core deployment processes using CI/CD pipelines to enable fast, reliable, and consistent platform updates.
• Served as technical lead and primary maintainer for a private BinderHub deployment at the Turing Institute, ensuring stability, scalability, and performance.
• Facilitated monthly community calls, fostering collaboration, gathering feedback, and guiding technical priorities for ongoing platform development.
 
• Software Sustainability Institute · Remote, UK
• Independent Consultancy (<i>paid</i>) · Oct. 2023 - Jun. 2024
• Designed training on software engineering best practices-focusing on version control, code readability, and FAIR principles-for a research software course. [original repo|new location]
• Fellow · awarded Jan. 2020
• Initiated and cultivated a community of practice focused on leveraging cloud infrastructure to enable reproducible research, fostering collaboration, knowledge sharing, and peer support across disciplines. [blog]
 
• OLS · Remote, UK
• Mentor · Feb. 2021 - Jan. 2022
• Mentored cohorts from under-represented communities in open leadership development, guiding them in growing sustainable open science projects and fostering inclusive, collaborative communities.

Education

• Astrophysics Ph.D. · University of Leicester · Mar. 2015 - Sep. 2018
• Thesis: Understanding the Most Powerful Explosions in the Universe
• MPhys Physics with Astrophysics · University of Hull · Sep. 2010 - May 2014

Courses

Projects

• GitHub Activity Dashboard
• A set of dashboards to visualise my activity on GitHub, and assist me in generating reports and invoicing work done.
• Blogging with Hugo and GitHub Pages lesson
• A Carpentries-style lesson guiding users through building a blogging website using Hugo and GitHub Pages. It covers CI/CD methodology and testing to verify and deploy the website. A video walkthrough of the lesson has >6k views on YouTube. [lesson|video|blog]
• bump-helm-deps-action
• A GitHub Action, written in Python, that opens automated Pull Requests bumping the versions of sub-charts defined in a Helm chart in the chosen repository. [repo]

Skills