Graham Whitehouse

As the Master Distiller and Founder of Chalk Lion Distillery, I develop and produce our small-batch spirits inspired by the Chiltern Hills and the idea that great drinks bring people together. I design every recipe, refine every batch, and make sure each bottle we release reflects the creativity, character, and craft at the heart of our brand. My work spans everything from experimenting with botanicals and balancing flavour profiles to running the stills, making the cuts, and overseeing every step of distillation. I manage fermentation, distillation, blending, proofing, and quality checks, ensuring that our spirits meet both our own standards and all UK compliance requirements. I also lead all excise-related responsibilities, including duty management, stock reconciliation, and HMRC controls. Beyond production, I shape the brand’s identity and storytelling — naming products, developing concepts, and grounding everything we do in the landscape and heritage of the Chilterns. I work closely on packaging, marketing ideas, and customer experiences, championing spirits designed to be shared, sipped, and enjoyed socially. I also manage the operational side of the business: supplier relationships, production planning, sourcing, inventory, and costs. And whether it’s tastings, events, or collaborations, I represent the distillery and the ethos behind our drinks. Highlights include: • Building the distillery and product range from the ground up. • Creating our signature gins — The Classic, The Ramble, The Forage, The Bloom — plus our gift set and our evolving rum releases. • Establishing a craft-led, community-rooted brand with a focus on quality, creativity, and a genuine love of the process.

Supported and scaled UKHSA’s digital operations: • New L2/L3 Support: Launched a KPI-driven service desk, onboarding / assessing / decommissioning 40+ digital products; introduced a three-phase “Assess → Uplift → Operate” model and whole-life-cost metrics that cut risk and spend. • Quality Assurance & Testing: Put QAT at the centre of delivery—separating assurance from test execution, moving to SoW-based sourcing, and refreshing the tool-chain (automation, NFR, accessibility, AI-assisted testing). • Platform Engineering: Built a core function plus “DevOps-as-a-Service”; delivered self-service cloud landing zones via GitHub Actions and ServiceNow forms, powering the new Cloud CoE and accelerating releases. • ServiceNow Recovery: Reset partner governance, removed waste, rebuilt CMDB/CSDM, ITOM & Discovery, launched a new CX portal and produced a three-year roadmap—all within one financial year. • Salesforce Strategy: Established Salesforce as the agency’s CRM, shipped a care-home outbreak reporting solution, deprecated costly legacy apps and set a scale-out plan. • Operating-Model Transition: Drafted a new digital operating model, delivered a 90-day plan, aligned roles to GDaD and produced a cross-discipline RACI—guiding a major organisational reshape. • Programme & Product Support: Advised flagship programmes (BigRocks Cloud, API Platform, Surge Response Service) on architecture and IaC; unblocked delivery of Data Dashboard, Health Publications, x-gov Forms, eNOIDS and a reusable address-lookup API. • Observability: Authored the agency’s observability strategy in four weeks, exited Splunk, selected an open-standards tool-stack and kicked off platform rollout. Impact: Elevated support, quality and platform engineering maturity; slashed legacy risk; and enabled faster, safer product delivery across UKHSA’s digital estate.

I worked with the team at Burendo, supporting various customer initiatives during a period of hiatus from engineering-based work. I learned a lot working with the bid writing team as it was completely new to me assisting with writing bids for G-Cloud submission and government contract bids leaning on previous expertise. This was a great opportunity and helped me understand areas of consultancy I had previously only had limited exposure to. I also consulted on some aspects of digital transformation for some of Burendos clients, supporting the wider team with some specific areas of expertise regarding enterprise based engagements leaning heavily on prior experience at Deloitte and the UKHSA.

My role at UKHSA is to be a member of Technology Business Partnering, which is a function formed following the Covid response, as part of the Senior Leadership Team as Head of Engineering. I was bought in to drive transformation activities not only on the ground as part of the delivery teams but also strategically to help form what role Technology would play in the future of the UKHSA. The role evolved over many months starting with a ground-up assessment of delivery processes highlighting many key opportunities for standards and best practice. I drove the adoption of the following key enabling processes: • Overhaul of the delivery teams’ approach adopting a DevOps Culture • Engineering principles around Secure Coding practices • Strategies and tools to underpin Automation First in software testing • Rationalisation of CI/CD tooling using GitHub • The production of a shared template design for Infrastructure and Workflows • Frameworks for supporting Security Championship and Threat Modelling As well as this I have been a key strategic driver in the future of Technology supporting the production of an Operating Model to bring the entirety of Technology together under one strategic banner. I am now leading Development and Operations initiatives underpinning core strategic deliverables including: • Production of a new Azure Landing Zone • Rationalisation of separate Azure AD tenants including transition of management workloads to enduring teams • Consolidation of two M365 tenants • Roll out of ServiceNow and building a team to support delivery In a nutshell, I have been: • Leading on Engineering best practice • Managing relationships with third-party suppliers including the Big Three • Supporting deliveries with expertise and design • Saving money by supporting programme deliveries • Driving strategy on delivery as well as operationally • Thought Leadership for new opportunities across Technology • Driving Continuous Improvement across the entire team

My role at Airslip is to lead the development of a new and innovative product that allows consumers to digitally receive receipts from in-store checkouts. This required me to build an application that could match transactions to users using AI-driven algorithms. Due to this being a start-up I didn’t have a team so had to build the application from the ground up. In a nutshell, it was made up of the following: • Infrastructure built on Azure using Terraform for hands-off deployments • CI/CD using GitHub Actions • Mobile app built using Swift • Event-driven architecture using Event hubs • API presentations using API Management Services • Function apps using C# • Web API using C# • Storage using Mongo DB • Web-based front end using React (v14) All supporting components were built as microservices and hosted either as scalable function apps or app services. As a route to customer acquisition, I built an integration and analysis platform with a supporting web-based dashboard that supported multiple user types. The main premise is to allow partners access to the data of their business customers. The integration platform is built with flexibility in mind and allows connecting any external service to an internally built microservice via configuration only meaning integrations can be built and deployed in days rather than weeks. I built tools that extract required data from commerce and open banking providers so that we can provide statistical analysis of this data. I also built a data authorisation process that allowed businesses to control which partners could view the different aspects of their data and wire this into all points of data access. The entire system is built using event-based architecture minimising component-based dependencies, this design reduces outage risks based on API dependencies. On top of this was a portal built completely using React starting from a template to speed up development but massively customised to fit our purpose.

This role provided a great opportunity to prove my leadership skills in a global company. I led four distinct technology areas spanning the breadth of the internal Business Applications function and cover: • .Net and Opensource Development • Traditional Operations • DevOps • ServiceNow Development My teams maintained, built, and delivered 30+ applications that support the business's day-to-day running as well as European wide development within the ServiceNow platform. I remained very hands-on in my day-to-day role, often defining strategy by leading by example. A key example of this would be implementing a push left mentality with DevOps processes using Terraform for infrastructure provisioning. I was a strategic leader for the internal CBS function with my teams leading on Agile Transformation as well as DevOps adoption, automation first and push left mentality. This role allowed me to present at the highest level of management within CBS as well as attend conferences to provide demonstrations on DevOps culture and the benefits to delivery teams. Key Responsibilities: • Building and developing a 30+ strong diverse team • Driving change and adoption within new technologies • Reporting and KPIs for senior leadership • Application design support for development teams • Defining software delivery strategies • Interpreting governance structures into working models Key Achievements: • DevOps automation across every software delivery • Agile transformation in 2 key deliveries and now supporting the wider rollout • Implementation of a custom event-driven monitoring solution • Building an API abstraction platform for supporting the wider business • Collaborating on implementing ‘Next Gen Hackathons’ • Driving a Global change in PaaS implementations • Establishing distributed teams from all around the world

I was promoted to Technical Director allowing me to drive all aspects of delivery from internal infrastructure to software delivery. This was an exciting opportunity to really create something new in an ever changing landscape of demand which really challenged me as a person. I was able roll my sleeves up and continue with developing as well as driving the direction of IT.