Ethan C. Houghton
SysOps Engineer
Cape Town, South Africa
Summary
Systems engineer specialising in infrastructure automation, security operations, and platform engineering. Track record of building internal tooling that eliminates manual processes, with hands-on experience across enterprise security deployments for major organisations. Self-taught, driven by first-principles thinking.
Experience
SysOps Engineer
October 2023 – PresentNclose | Integrity360 · Cape Town
- Deployed and maintained security systems across enterprise environments for clients including Sanlam, Shoprite, Clicks, Sun International, Coronation and Harmony Gold
- Built automated triage tooling for Opensearch, reducing the effort required to maintain Opensearch clusters
- Managed Linux infrastructure using Puppet configuration management
- Completed 5+ full platform deployments from scoping through to production handover
WhatsApp Support Consultant
April 2021 – September 2023Afrihost · Johannesburg
- Provided technical support across the full Afrihost product suite: fibre, ADSL, mobile data, web hosting, and email
- Consistently ranked in the top 15 of approximately 150 support consultants
- Built an internal automation tool that systematically diagnosed all categories of hosting queries
- Handled DNS administration, device configuration, service provisioning, and fault logging
Projects
See detailed project writeups at houghton.rocks/projects
Education
Jeppe High School for Boys
Matriculated, 2020
Certifications
CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate)
In progress
CompTIA Linux+
In progress
cPanel Professional (CPP)
Issued
Skills
Infrastructure
Linux (daily driver)VMware ESXiPuppetDNScPanel
Security
Elastic Stack / OpensearchSIEMDetection Engineering
Development
PythonTypeScriptNext.jsBash scripting
Tooling
GitGitHubVercelCloudflareWeb Scraping
Practices
Infrastructure as CodeAutomationConfiguration ManagementDevOps