Paulina Stopa

Unix Engineer — Sky UK Ltd

Leeds, United Kingdom · February 2017 – Present · previously Shift Leader (2018–2019)

Engineer in Sky's largest Unix team, fulfilling senior-level responsibilities — reliability, automation and engineering standards across a ~10,000-host critical estate of physical and virtual RHEL systems (plus legacy Solaris) underpinning national-scale services.

• Fleet automation at scale: production automation in Python, Bash and Ansible across the estate — provisioning, patching and lifecycle via Red Hat Satellite, orchestration through AWX running on a K3S Kubernetes cluster our team designed and deployed.
• Identity engineering: operate the corporate 389-ds LDAP estate powering authentication, groups, netgroups, sudo policy and automount fleet-wide; led the data conversion and migration of the central LDAP service authenticating tens of thousands of users — plus third-party retail LDAPs and legacy ODSEE systems maintained for service continuity.
• Internal tooling portfolio: helped design, build and maintain the team's tool estate — LDAPtool and uID (identity management web tools), the Redirect Platform (hundreds of Sky domains including sky.com and skysports.com), GoAccess log analytics, Redash compliance reporting (Lynis, MariaDB cluster), PCS cluster status for Pacemaker/Corosync HA, a Caddy reverse proxy with ACME certificates, an MkDocs knowledge base and the Unix Tools Dashboard.
• Integrations & workflow automation: built integrations between CyberArk, GitHub and MS Teams, and automated email notification workflows for operational events.
• Standards & enablement: own documentation and engineering standards for the wider team (Backline function); train and onboard engineers to production standard; former Shift Leader with Incident Coordinator training — hands-on incident management from detection through resolution and review.
• AI adoption: drive practical AI use across Sky's engineering community — a regular contributor on GenAI, containerisation and security, with work recognised by the Head of Enterprise Product Strategy (GenAI).

Independent AI Engineering — Autonomous Operations Platform

Self-directed engineering programme · October 2024 – Present

Designed, built and operate a production-grade autonomous-operations estate on my own infrastructure — the full stack from hardware assembly through virtualisation to AI services. Everything below runs today: versioned as code, monitored, governed.

• Sky Unix AI Platform (concept & vision demo): built solo, on this platform and in my own time, an interactive mock-up exploring AI-assisted operations for a Unix estate — LLM incident triage over a runbook knowledge base, remediation behind human approval gates and workflow visualisations — plus a costed requirements analysis of the path from proof-of-concept to production. Built to test feasibility and inspire AI adoption at Sky.
• AI platform: 63 Docker containers on a GPU-passthrough Proxmox VM (2× NVIDIA P100) — LiteLLM model gateway, Ollama local inference (Gemma, Llama, Nemotron, Qwen), a self-hosted Dify RAG stack with Qdrant, and speech, image, video and music generation services behind Traefik ingress; all versioned Docker Compose infrastructure-as-code in self-hosted Gitea with CI. Evaluated and self-hosted NVIDIA DGX Spark (2026).
• Autonomous agents: two LLM agent harnesses running 24/7 on dedicated service accounts behind human review gates — executing scheduled operational tasks across 27 skill categories and authoring incident and postmortem reports published as internal sites.
• ClawBoard (author; open source, MIT): agent-operations dashboard with real-time agent status over WebSocket, a full transcript audit trail, JWT authentication and a gated production/development deployment workflow — github.com/Wadera/clawboard.
• Fleet & hosting estate: 20 Ansible playbooks and 12 roles executed via self-hosted Semaphore across a two-node Proxmox HA cluster (~120 containers estate-wide) running Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, Rocky and Windows — snapshot-before-change with automated restore, per-host-class patching and Vault-encrypted secrets; plus a classic hosting layer operated for years: DirectAdmin, Proxmox Mail Gateway, Prometheus, Uptime Kuma, Gitea, Nextcloud and production WordPress, Ghost, Drupal and e-commerce (WooCommerce, PrestaShop) sites.

Founder & Owner — SKYDAY

Chojnów, Poland · April 2012 – February 2017

Built one of Poland's largest voice-server platforms — 10,000+ concurrent users and 100,000+ registered accounts — including the custom CRM and billing system behind it.

• Led a company of eight as founder and managing director — budgeting, client acquisition, government grant funding, and end-to-end project delivery for clients including the Polish National Bank and Play (mobile operator).
• Operated dedicated-server infrastructure hosting hundreds of domains and services — from hardware to SEO and marketing delivery.

Co-founder — Digital Technologies S.C.

Poland · November 2014 – November 2016

Among Poland's first certified commercial UAV operators — aerial photogrammetry and 3D measurement models for construction and solar-installation clients.