Meet The Team

Mark Taylor
CEO

Mark Taylor is a well known figure in the Open Source community and participant in the organizations that helped establish Open Source - now into his third decade on the front line. He is the founder, and for 5 years consecutively President, of the UK Open Source Consortium, is an expert advisor to the Free Software Foundation Europe, the UK representative of the Open Source Software Institute, and occasional advisor to the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative. A long time advocate of Open Source, Mark is a well-known speaker and writer on all aspects of the phenomenon.

As CEO of Sirius, Mark has been instrumental in the adoption and rollout of Open Source software in Businesses, Government and Public Sector, Healthcare, Educational Institutions and third-sector organizations large and small around the world.

Mark's political activities include acting as a technology advisor to the UK Government, and Government CTO, including a 6 month stint as Chair of the Cabinet Office New Suppliers to Government working group and invited membership of the SME Panel. Mark stands for Open Source, Open Standards and Open Data, SME engagement with Government, and for equal participation of Women in Technology.

Mark lives in America, and outside the world of Open Source he enjoys spending time with his family, keeping fit at the gym, is a Goju Ryu Karate Black Belt training at the Dojo, working his way through the Western Canon, and learning languages modern and ancient.

 

Simon King
Support Manager

With a diverse background in IT, Simon has performed in a number of roles from development, through quality assurance and test, right up to production support.. From the formative years playing with Spectrum and then Acorn computers, his education extended through to being sponsored by a large corporation on a Computer Science degree. His practical experience includes time in the public sector, financial market IT transport and more, in teams and companies ranging from small to multinational. With a firm grasp on the full life-cycle of IT delivery, Simon is now managing our 24x7 support and operations team.

Thomas Flatley
Senior Database Engineer

Thomas began his Computer Science career as a Cobol/DB2 programmer working on Y2K issues at Vanguard. He then transitioned to the SQL world, joining a small Oracle consultancy as an application developer. The following year he switched to the Database Administration/Operations group and spent the next 15 years working in various sectors, from aeronautical engineering to agri-business, financial services to pharmaceuticals, on a multitude of systems ranging from AIX to VMS.

In recent years Thomas has focused on various RDBMs platforms in addition to Oracle, including SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

Thomas joined Sirius at the beginning of 2020 as a Senior Support Engineer focusing on RDBMs support and platform migration.

 

Louise Menezes
Office Manager

Louise joined the Sirius Team in 2014. Starting as a PA to the CEO, she has worked her way up to become the UK Office Manager looking after HR, H&S and Sirius' ISO compliance.

Working with the CEO, Louise helps make company-wide decisions, and in 2019 took on managing the project with her team to successfully achieve ISO 27001 and 9001 certification for the company.

Coming from a multicultural background, Louise loves to travel and explore all the cultures of the world, especially local cuisines. In her free time she loves taking her daughter on fun days out exploring across the UK.

Simon Pither
Senior Engineer

Simon has been a developer and systems administrator for over twenty years with technical experience that includes building and deploying online software available to hundreds of thousands of users, supporting high pressure flash sales and simplifying complex data warehouse and search systems.

Simon's skills include Web application and infrastructure scaling and performance consultancy and troubleshooting. Advising on factors from hardware and virtualization through Linux, standard applications (including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache and Tomcat), and into bespoke application code. From single server systems to complex clustered, multi-server and multi-site architectures.

Samreen Syed
Account Manager

Samreen is an Account Manager and has been with Sirius since 2018. She serves as a point of contact with our clients in building and maintaining relationships. Samreen has a strong professional background in retail and e-commerce, account management, customer services and media. She is an ambitious individual with insatiable drive to get things done, progress and accomplish.

Samreen originally comes from Jeddah, KSA and also has roots in India. In her free time Samreen enjoys travel and is passionate about Art, Independent Cinema and Music.

Daniel Toe
Support Engineer

Daniel moved to England in 2014 and gained a Computer Science degree. He joined Sirius to specialize in Open Source technologies, and was thoroughly trained in the art of outstanding Client support!

Applying his Computer Science degree to master technologies such as Apache webserver, web content management systems such as Drupal and WordPress, cloud technologies such as AWS, and the latest in virtualization and containerization like Docker, Daniel has become a mainstay of the Sirius Support Team!

Outside the world of work Daniel's favorite hobbies are strolling around the ancient city of London discovering its hidden historical treasures, exploring England's green and pleasant land visiting its great cathedrals, beautiful castles and breathtaking villages, history, theology, systematic study of the Christian bible and the study of ancient languages of Hebrew and Greek.

James Holland
Support Engineer

James is part of the UK Overnight Support Team along with Roy and Dan. Like them, he works evenings and overnight shifts. Apart from responding to tickets and events, he enjoys learning to implement our infrastructure - particularly monitoring and backups, mainly within AWS.

Outside Sirius James likes the pub, endures HIIT, plays football, and does Zumba, most weeks, and enjoys mountaineering when he can get out of London.

Kim Hawkins
Support Engineer

Born in the multicultural city of Liverpool, Kim has a background in Classics and Ancient Narrative Literature. After several years in the healthcare industry where she developed her technical, interpersonal and communication skills, Kim formally moved into the sysadmin world in 2016. Initially fulfilling a part time role in between formal training, she provided holiday cover for other Sirius support staff. In 2019 Kim became a full time member of the technical support team as an engineer on the busy daytime shift.

Kim enjoys working with the varied customers that Sirius supports. She also thoroughly enjoys learning and is brushing up her Linux skills, as well as taking steps into the worlds of PostgreSQL, Docker and Kubernetes.

Outside of work, she is a co-parent to four children, and likes to spend time having fun with them. Outside of parenthood she most likes to read, go for walks, play games, listen to music, and get immersed in the world of Japanese anime. She also occasionally runs around in a field pretending to be a fictional character in live-action role-playing game Blood Red Roses. When she's not at home, you'll find her at various geeky conventions.

Hyung Hoon Song
Support Engineer

Hyung Hoon Song is a Sirius Support Engineer who joined the company in 2019.

He holds BSc in Mathematics from Royal Holloway, and is currently competing his MSc in Computer Science from Birkbeck College in the UK.

In his free time, Hoon enjoys reading and... sleeping! During holidays, he likes to visit his family in Seoul, South Korea.

Matt Farrow
Senior Drupal Developer

Matt has been building, developing and managing enterprise websites for 20 years.

Before joining Sirius in 2015, he was Digital Development Manager at the University of Surrey, where he oversaw the implementation of two organisation-wide content management systems, including Drupal.

Prior to that, he was Head of Information and Knowledge Sharing at WWF-UK, having overall responsibility for web and internal knowledge systems development.

Paul Turton
Senior Support Engineer

Paul joined us as a first line helpdesk coordinator and has worked up to the role of Senior Support Engineer, he is now one of the longest serving members of Sirius.

Paul has always been fascinated with technology and quickly picks up new skills in various products to help find the best solution and fixes for our clients needs.

Paul recently became a AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate and is now looking for gaining further qualifications in this field.

Rajeev Kumar
Senior Drupal Developer

Rajeev is working as Senior Drupal Developer at Sirius and has been coding since 2010. He started his development career in the educational research sector and since then has been involved in several projects ranging from project management tools to e-commerce, rental systems, e-governance and SAAS. He is capable of developing smooth functioning systems based upon high level concepts.

He is an active member of the Drupal community and has been a key member of the several DrupalCamp committee in India since his start.

Rajeev lives in Bracknell with his wife and daughter. He's been known to escape from work for travelling to the hills, attending technical or classical music events.

He can sit in front of computer screen for many hours while keeping himself busy with coding and planning out projects to make others' life easier.