Christopher Law (BSc Hons)
Principal Software Architect | Platform Engineering | Kubernetes | .NET
20+ years experience designing large-scale distributed systems, Kubernetes platforms, and enterprise .NET applications across public sector and regulated industries.

Contact
Latest Project Work
- Enterprise .NET Modernisation - iterative improvement of legacy applications and delivery workflows
- Kubernetes - K8S / K3S / RKE2 / Rancher
- Open Container Initiative - Docker / Podman / ContainerD
- CI/CD and SCM Tooling - Drone CI / GitHub Actions / Azure DevOps Pipelines / Gitea / Forgejo
- Container Registry and Supply Chain - Harbor / image promotion / vulnerability scanning (Trivy)
- AI Assisted Software Development - LLM aided design, analysis and delivery
- Deployment Automation - GitOps, Helm, environment configuration, rollout strategies
- Virtualisation and Cloud Solutions - Azure / Proxmox / RedHat oVirt / KVM
Homelab Infrastructure Overview (2026)
An Application Architect / DevOps Engineer / Designer / .NET Developer specialising in .NET architecture, application design, and enterprise modernisation, with deep Linux, infrastructure, and networking expertise working for one of the UK's largest digital service providers, Atos. During my 15+ years there I have led work for notable clients such as NHS Scotland and England, Princes (Manufacturing Enterprise Systems), Travelex (Global), UK Gov (MoJ, NCA, DCMS), NCP, Allianz Finance, Cineworld and the DCMS National Lottery.
In my main role as an Application Architect, I focus on building clean modern .NET solutions and modernising large legacy enterprise codebases through iterative improvement. I apply engineering approaches aligned with continuous delivery principles to make systems easier to maintain, reduce operational overhead, and create efficiency savings through CI/CD and automation.
My strongest contribution is in shaping and engineering application and software designs that give teams clear direction. I focus on creating robust, secure and maintainable solutions so developers have a strong foundation to build on and can deliver high-quality applications with confidence.
Many of the engagements I've worked on have been long term, which I see as a real advantage in consultancy. It has allowed me to see the consequences of design decisions over time, understand what stands up in practice, and carry those lessons into future architecture and delivery work.
In the development arena I've worked heavily with Microsoft technologies; responsible for establishing good practice guidelines and patterns including CI, unit testing, coding standards, repository patterns, dependency injection, branching strategies and release management. I mentor engineers and help teams adopt modern engineering practices to increase delivery velocity and code confidence. I also work on several open source projects.
Passionate about Kubernetes and modern platform tooling. I actively work with RKE2, K3S, Rancher, GitOps (Flux), Vault, CertManager, Cilium and distributed storage patterns in a platform environment that is designed and operated as a small enterprise estate supporting our family business architectural firm. It also provides hosting for a small number of client and small business workloads, alongside internal services and ongoing platform engineering work. My CV web site is a practical example of this approach, being self-hosted on RKE2 Kubernetes and delivered through CI/CD and GitOps.
Recently I've also incorporated AI assisted software engineering practices into my workflow, and I'm a strong advocate for using AI the right way through spec-driven development, carefully crafted prompts, disciplined output review, and pragmatic use of LLM powered tools to accelerate delivery, support large-scale codebase analysis, improve documentation quality, and explore solution designs. I also have experience with self-hosted LLM infrastructure including model serving via vLLM and containerised deployment approaches on Kubernetes.
I'm part of the Atos Diversity and Inclusion programme, celebrating diversity in the workforce, as I believe diverse workforces are reflective of our customers and allow us to be more innovative and productive.
A graduate in Computer Science with a four year sandwich course honours degree including a year working as an IT specialist in the petrochemicals industry.
Skills and Technology
| Skill | Proficiency |
|---|---|
| Solution Documentation Detailed Functional Design / Detailed Technical Design / Enterprise Architecture / Modernisation Strategy | Expert |
| Application Design N-Tier Architecture / SOLID / DRY / DI / Modular Monolith / DDD / Microservices / DevOps | Expert |
| Artificial Intelligence / AI Engineering LLM Assisted Development / Prompt Engineering / AI Code Generation / vLLM Model Serving / AI Assisted Architecture Design | Advanced |
| Kubernetes Helm, Cilium CNI, HashiCorp Vault, Flux GitOps, CertManager, K3s, RKE2, Rancher, MetalLB, OpenEBS, Longhorn, NFS, Traefik, Sealed Secrets, Multus, CI/CD | Expert |
| Containers Docker / Podman / OCI Images / containerd / BuildKit | Expert |
| Container Registries Harbor OCI Registry / Vulnerability Scanning (Trivy) / Image Promotion / Air-gapped Deployments | Advanced |
| CI/CD Drone CI / GitHub Actions / Azure DevOps Pipelines / GitOps Deployments / Automated Release Pipelines | Expert |
| Microsoft .NET Visual Studio .NET / Core / Framework / ASP.NET / Web Forms / MVC / Web API / Visual Basic | Expert |
| Compiled Languages C++ / C# / QuickBASIC | Expert |
| Additional Languages Oz | Novice |
| Web Services REST / SOAP / WCF / gRPC | Advanced |
| ORM Entity Framework / Dapper / Code First / Database First | Expert |
| DI Containers Unity / Castle Windsor / Ninject / .NET IoC | Expert |
| Unit Testing NUnit / MSTest / XUnit / Integration Testing | Expert |
| Mark-up Languages XML / JSON / YAML | Expert |
| Scripting Languages JavaScript / JQuery / Python / PHP / ASP / VBScript / Bash / PowerShell | Advanced |
| SQL MSSQL / MySQL / PostgreSQL / SQLite / Clusters / Replication / Performance Tuning | Intermediate |
| Source Control Git / GitLab / DevOps / TFS / Jenkins / Gitea / Forgejo / Drone / GitHub | Expert |
| Container Orchestration Kubernetes / Docker Swarm / Docker Compose | Expert |
| Networks VLANs / VNETS / Routing / Site to Site VPNs / Firewalls / Load Balancing / Failover / NAT / OVN (OpenVSwitch) / Tunnels / Overlay Networks / Reverse Proxy Configuration | Advanced |
| System Administration WDS / AD / AD Migration / LDAP / GPO / Permission Management / Filesystem Recovery / Replication / Root and Intermediate Certificate Authority Setup | Advanced |
| Document Management SharePoint Development | Proficient |
| Linux Distributions CentOS / Gentoo / RedHat / Ubuntu / Fedora / Arch | Expert |
| Linux Skills BASH / SSH / Tunnels / Cron / Filesystem Recovery / LDAP / LVM / ZFS / DRBD / NGINX / Apache / HA Proxy | Expert |
| Automated Deployments Ansible Playbooks / PowerShell / IaC / GitOps | Advanced |
| Production Deployments / Zero Downtime Deployments / Automated Deployments / National and Critical System Tech Refresh | Expert |
| Cloud Containers / Azure / IaaS / SaaS / PaaS (.NET App Service Deployments) / ARM Templates / App Services / Worker Services / Migrations | Advanced |
| Virtualisation VM Management / VM Networking / Proxmox / Red Hat Virtualisation Manager (oVirt) / XEN / KVM / PCI Passthrough / vGPU / ARM Templates | Expert |
| FreeBSD TrueNAS Core / Desktop | Advanced |
| Storage ZFS / TrueNAS / Ceph / NFS / Distributed Storage | Advanced |
| VoIP Cisco Phone Configuration / Asterisk / FreePBX / SIP | Proficient |
| Manufacturing Systems Wonderware / Manufacturing Enterprise Systems | Novice |
Projects
- NHS Scotland Workforce Systems and SSTS
(2022 - Current)
Role: Application Architect for Workforce and SSTS- Since joining this project I have been asked to lead the modernisation and transformation of one of the largest enterprise applications on the NHS Scotland account. This involves redirecting the solution and addressing significant technical debt, improving engineering practices, and establishing a modern delivery approach.
- Oversee both Workforce Systems and SSTS technical direction, including tooling, DevOps, Git, CI/CD and application architecture, ensuring the technical roadmap supports long-term modernisation.
- Workforce Systems is a payroll and expenses suite of applications. SSTS is a national time and rostering system. These are some of the largest and most business-critical enterprise applications on the account.
- Lead modern engineering adoption such as automated pipelines, release management improvements, improved branching strategies, and platform approaches.
- Manage development teams and provide a joined-up approach between Workforce and SSTS systems, ensuring alignment and reuse where possible across platform services, tooling and technical patterns.
- NHS Scotland Workforce Systems
(2021 - 2022)
Role: Development Manager / Technical Architect- Managed a team of developers for the NHS Scotland Payroll system, a highly complex suite of applications processing payroll nationally across Scotland.
- Involved in modernisation and transformation with a view to establish future strategic direction and improve quality gates and delivery practices.
- Moved legacy areas toward modern architecture patterns and improved tooling and CI/CD pipelines to increase delivery confidence and throughput.
- Northumbrian Water Ltd
(2020 - 2021)
Role: Migration Architect / Consultant- Phased migration of on-premise data centre to Azure cloud for this utilities company.
- Responsible for producing the solution and migration approach from on-premise to Azure.
- NHS Scotland eOphthalmic and eDental Systems
(2014 - 2020)
Role: Architect / Designer / Developer- Produced architecture, design documentation and work packages to feed into the development process, including critical infrastructure design for GP and Pharmacy infrastructure and supporting applications.
- Responsible for producing the architecture and design for two national medical systems written in C# MVC with code analysis, automated testing and recognised patterns such as dependency injection and Entity Framework.
- Designed and delivered changes to large scale medical systems with parallel work streams, multiple deployments and branch / merge strategies.
- NHS Scotland Cloud Applications
(2017 - 2018)
Role: Architect / Designer / Developer- Designed and developed national medical cloud applications built on C# .NET Core App Services.
- This involved PaaS and IaaS services, including Azure SQL, Azure DNS, Azure AD and VM / network provisioning.
- Used Azure deployment slots and configuration management to enable zero downtime deployments and environment switching between Live, Test and Staging.
- Involved in initial setup of Azure subscriptions and infrastructure including vNets, VMs, VPNs and DNS.
Open Source Projects
- AdoScope
(2023 - Present)
- Produced AdoScope, a simple and flexible solution for managing ADO.NET connections and transactions.
- It draws inspiration from DbContextScope by Mehdime El Gueddari, adapting the pattern for lightweight Dapper-based systems while supporting scoped transactions and clean separation of concerns.
- Proxmox and Virtualisation Platform Engineering
(2022 - Present)
- Designed, deployed and run Proxmox based virtualisation platforms including clustered compute, shared storage and mixed VM and container workloads.
- Worked extensively with GPU and PCI passthrough, vGPU style workload patterns and nested virtualisation experimentation across lab and client style environments.
- Xen Project
(2011 - 2021)
- Involved in configuring and testing graphics card passthrough and nested virtualisation for the Xen Project.
- Heavy Xen user for many years, running Linux Xen hypervisors with LVM, RAID and distributed storage through DRBD, hosting multiple paravirtualised VMs with containerised applications and Windows CAD VMs.
- The combination of Xen and DRBD allows for high availability and failover.
- Docker
(2018 - Present)
- Designed, built and contributed to several open source Docker container projects.
- WatchPage - an MVC C# .NET Core application designed and built for posting and monitoring changes to various web pages.
- BitWallet - a Bitcoin wallet application where I contributed by improving security to the VNC UI through various code changes.
Testimonials
- NHS Scotland
Practitioner Counter Fraud ServicesFurther to my comments when I saw you in Livingston a few weeks ago, I would like to put on record my appreciation for all of Chris Law's efforts throughout the eOphthalmic project. It is fair to say that he has been central to the successful delivery of this project. He has always been extremely helpful and willing to go the extra mile to get things done. He has been a pleasure to work with.
- NHS Scotland
Atos Programme ManagerChris has been vital to Iain's eOphthalmic project and it is down to his expertise and customer focus that result in Atos being given more business.
- NHS Scotland
Atos Project ManagereOphthalmic, eDental and next eOrtho are regarded within the NHSS account as important and successful projects. My feedback to you is that this is largely down to the efforts of one person, Chris, who has worked tirelessly over the last 3.5 years on this series of projects.
Open Source Interests
- Kubernetes - Rancher / K3S / GitOps
- Virtualisation - Proxmox / XEN / KVM
- Microservices - Ocelot / Consul / RabbitMQ
- Cloud - OpenStack / Azure
- Containers and Container Orchestration
- Telecoms - FreePBX and Asterisk
- Linux - Gentoo, Ubuntu and Arch
- Python
- AI / LLM Tooling - model serving and automation experiments
Hobbies / Other Interests
- Competitive Rowing - Tees Rowing Club
- Gym
- Music - Flugelhorn and Cornet