Connor O'Neill
Wollongong,NSW
Summary
With over 13 years of experience in the IT industry, the most valuable lesson I’ve learned is that technology is in constant evolution—and organisations must evolve in step. Thriving in this dynamic landscape requires not only technical expertise, but also the ability to see the broader strategic picture and clearly communicate it to both specialists and senior decision-makers. That’s where I add the most value. A standout achievement in my career has been leading the secure migration of a large Federal agency’s production and dissemination systems to a cloud platform—significantly improving operational resilience, scalability, and performance.
Overview
9
9
years of professional experience
Work History
Director Official Sensitive Systems - Cloud
Department of Defence
07.2024 - Current
- Established the directorate from the ground up, delivering foundational support for four major ICT platforms comprising over 40 integrated systems.
- Led a diverse portfolio of ICT initiatives valued at approximately $40 million annually, ensuring alignment with strategic and operational objectives.
- Regularly briefed senior executives on complex systems architecture, application roadmaps, technology risks, and financial performance to inform strategic decision-making.
- Championed staff development by mentoring new starters and establishing structured mentorship sessions with future leaders across the organisation.
- Manage Cloud, on premise and hybrid systems ICT systems throughout their life cycle.
- Drive cloud adoption across the agency.
- Resolved complex ICT challenges through a senior executive lens, balancing strategic priorities, operational impact, and stakeholder expectations to deliver effective and sustainable outcomes.
Technical delivery lead
Department of Defence
06.2019 - 08.2024
- Responsible for the technical delivery of a suite of cloud-based platforms and on-premises applications, enabling the business to respond flexibly and rapidly to changing environments and situations while keeping a high standard of security.
- Oversee three technical teams of 15+ professionals to build, sustain, and maintain multiple multimillion dollar projects across a larger program of work.
- Migration of on-premises applications to cloud based platforms.
- Designed, build, and implement custom solutions for large data problems within the agency.
- Successfully built collaborative relationships with SMEs, Enterprise Architects, Enterprise Security teams, and equivalent teams across public and private sectors ensuring ongoing support of the projects.
- Designed tooling to optimise cloud environment (PaaS and SaaS) usage increasing efficiencies, including; automated alerting, cost optimization, and integration with business intelligence.
- Effectively designed, developed, and implemented a flexible system to enable core business operation while aligning to both the ASD Essential 8 and Defence Information Security Manual.
- Worked closely across the wider agency to assist with both cultural and technical changes to the way we do business.
- Constant participation in integrated project teams comprising technical and non-technical personnel ensured capabilities stayed up to date with current trends across industry, the internal agency and the wider user community.
- Built DevOps culture within the program to enable Agile development of customer focus applications through real time iteration with stakeholders to deliver demonstrated outcomes for end users.
GEOINT Technologist
Department of Defence
06.2016 - 06.2019
- Geospatial Dev Team Lead an agile development team charged with the delivery of geospatial systems for the project. In this role I provided the team strategic direction and managed the internal workflows high level workloads, in addition to running the SCRUM planning and retrospectives sessions.
- Lead Cloud Administration Responsible for managing two separate cloud platforms consisting of 35 AWS accounts with 200 users and 150 virtual machines.
Education
Bachelor of Information Technology - Network Design And Management
University of Wollongong
01.2016
Skills
- Technical Leadership
- People Leadership
- Solution architecture
- Geospatial experience
- Understand complex systems
- Requirements gathering
- Capability development
- Vendor management
- Solution design
- System engineering
- System integration
- Verification and validation
- Transition into service
- Agile / Scrum
- Calm under pressure
Timeline
Director Official Sensitive Systems - Cloud
Department of Defence
07.2024 - Current
Technical delivery lead
Department of Defence
06.2019 - 08.2024
GEOINT Technologist
Department of Defence
06.2016 - 06.2019
Bachelor of Information Technology - Network Design And Management
University of Wollongong