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Professional record

Twenty-five years of senior engineering, architecture and leadership work, much of it on programmes the country depends on.

2024 to present

London, UK

Phat Monkey IT Ltd

Director

  • Advised senior stakeholders on cyber resilience, backup strategy, business continuity and infrastructure risk across Nutanix, Rubrik, Cisco and hybrid infrastructure environments
  • Helped an AI startup achieve ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 certification
  • Established DevSecOps and CI/CD foundations for smaller organisations, improving delivery discipline, security visibility and repeatability across GitHub, GitLab and cloud-adjacent workflows
  • AI architecture upskilling: agentic workflows, MLOps design (Azure Copilot Studio, AWS SageMaker), ISO/IEC 42001 governance and the EU Cyber Resilience Act
  • Pursuing CISM and C|CISO, and working towards Chartered IT Professional and Chartered in Cybersecurity

2000 to 2024

London, UK

Prior contract engagements

Senior Architect and Engineer

Experience spans the NHS during COVID-19, the Metropolitan Police, central and local government, as well as banking and financial services, pension funds, publishing, universities, airports, MSPs and commercial startups, across the UK and in senior engineering and architecture positions on programmes worth tens of millions of pounds.

  • Redesigned a critical enterprise database architecture, saving a programme £4 million in licensing, identified and implemented independently without external direction
  • Architected a data centre migration at one-third the cost of the proposed cloud alternative, delivering a £3 million saving that was funded after personally presenting the business case to executive leadership
  • Scaled nationally critical infrastructure 13× during the COVID-19 pandemic response, operating without PM or project lead support, including the logistics of £5M of hardware across greenfield datacentres
  • Upon conclusion of one engagement, the volume of work previously delivered by a single contractor required a 10-strong ATOS engineering team to maintain, a direct measure of the scope and depth of what was built
  • Rapid licensing audit yielding a £50,000 immediate saving, with a platform virtualisation migration saving a further £100,000+ on licensing
  • Provided architecture leadership across AWS, Oracle Cloud, IAM, disaster recovery and partner access for a central government cloud migration involving MOD, policing and government stakeholders
  • Served as Infrastructure Technical Authority and team lead on nationally critical policing programmes, managing teams of up to 8 engineers and leading accreditation and security compliance
  • Migrated live pandemic big data workloads to a Crown Hosting environment with zero PM support, and contributed to the Nightingale Hospital build alongside military personnel

Professional references

"Vishal is an outstanding consultant and tech lead. He brings deep expertise across virtualisation, infrastructure, data centre operations, and cybersecurity, and consistently connects the dots between technical detail and the bigger operational picture."

Lead Data Engineer, Mastek

"Vish was a key member of my team, helping to deliver a critical programme. He worked closely with internal project members, third party suppliers and customers, ensuring they understood the technical lens in a clear and thorough manner. Highly recommended."

Principal Technical Architect, UK Cabinet Office

"Vish has a wealth of skills and abilities and has been a real asset to the team. He was a key member when NHSE established the first Nightingale Hospital in London in response to COVID-19, coordinating IT infrastructure alongside engineers and military personnel."

Deputy Director, Infrastructure, NHS England and Improvement

All references verifiable on LinkedIn · linkedin.com/in/vishalvashisht