Sam Chance, MSc

git.bitlab21.com | samchance.com

Professional Summary

Data and systems engineer with five years’ experience in the UK tech industry. Works with Linux servers, networking and firewalls, containers, scripting and automation, data pipelines and IT support. Four years building production data infrastructure at a London technology company, followed by IT engineering and support for business clients at a managed service provider. Has run a multi-host Linux network at home for six years, including a router and firewall built on NixOS with VLAN segmentation, DNS, VPN and TLS. Full UK driving licence. Available to start immediately.

Professional Experience

IT Administrator — Western-IT (Managed Service Provider)

Apr 2025 – Jun 2026

Configured and maintained Linux servers (Debian/Ubuntu) for internal and client use, including self-hosted application deployment and containerised workloads with Docker on VPS environments
Managed networking, DNS records, reverse proxy (Nginx), firewall configuration (iptables) and SSL/TLS certificates across client environments
Built a Python reporting system that pulls asset data from a self-hosted Snipe-IT instance and generates bespoke equipment reports for clients, replacing a manual process
Built an AI ticket-assistance tool on the OpenAI API that reads Zendesk ticket summaries and assists engineers with resolution
Monitored and patched client estates using RMM tooling (NinjaOne, Splashtop), and administered SaaS platforms covering RMM, security and backup
Administered Microsoft 365, Intune, Autopilot, SharePoint, OneDrive, user accounts and device onboarding across client estates
Handled tickets from first contact through to resolution by phone, email and remote session in a small MSP team, carried out hardware installation and upgrades onsite, and produced technical documentation for clients and the internal knowledge base

Data Analyst / Engineer — What3Words

May 2020 – Apr 2024

Designed, built and maintained ETL pipelines with Apache Airflow and dbt, orchestrating over 50 DAGs and 30+ data models for analytics and reporting
Built a Python monitoring and alerting system that ingested partner API usage data, detected anomalies such as significant drops or partners going silent, and notified the business development team through Slack, enabling integration faults to be identified before partners reported them
Worked on analytics infrastructure hosted on VPS, including BigQuery databases, and provided systems support, troubleshooting and performance optimisation for production environments on a platform serving 100,000 daily users
Delivered a geospatial analysis with open-source tooling (GDAL, Osmium, QGIS) integrating What3Words and OpenStreetMap data, to understand how Network Rail engineers were using the What3Words API
Delivered technical presentations and written documentation that helped non-technical stakeholders understand systems and their capabilities
Promoted from Data Analyst to Data Engineer

Technical Skills

Systems & Infrastructure: Linux administration (NixOS, Debian/Ubuntu, Arch), six years exclusive use; Linux server and VPS management; virtualisation (QEMU/KVM, Proxmox); containerisation (Docker, systemd-nspawn); infrastructure as code (NixOS); NFS; SSH; GCP; Windows 10/11

Networking & Security: LAN/WAN, VLAN segmentation, routing, NAT, VPN, DNS; firewall configuration (nftables, iptables); SSL/TLS certificate management; Nginx reverse proxy; secrets management (sops-nix)

Automation & Programming: Python (5+ years), Bash (6+ years), SQL (5+ years), R, Nix, JavaScript, PowerShell (basic); Git; process automation; custom internal tooling; FastAPI and Flask; AI tooling (OpenAI API)

Data & Pipelines: Apache Airflow, dbt, Snakemake; PostgreSQL, PostGIS, BigQuery; pipeline design and maintenance; Grafana, Prometheus, custom Python monitoring, API and endpoint monitoring, Slack alerting

Support & Client-Facing: End-to-end service desk (phone, email, remote); incident, problem and request management; Microsoft 365, Intune, Autopilot, SharePoint, OneDrive; device onboarding; RMM (NinjaOne, Splashtop); technical documentation and user training

Personal Projects

Multi-host Linux network (6+ years): Home network running several servers with VLAN segmentation. The router and firewall is a Protectli appliance running NixOS with nftables, and handles routing, NAT, DNS, VPN and TLS for the network. Services run in systemd-nspawn containers, file shares run over NFS, and builds are offloaded to a remote build host. Every machine is managed from a single NixOS configuration (https://git.bitlab21.com/sam/nixos). Previously ran a Proxmox hypervisor.