Ben Corker
Principal Solutions Architect @Specialist Holidays Group
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WORK HISTORY
Principal Solutions Architect @Specialist Holidays Group
Principal Solutions Architect leading cloud strategy, platform architecture, and technical direction for a multi-brand travel group spanning six consumer brands.Hands-on architect with experience spanning backend, frontend, infrastructure, DevOps, and data — responsible for shaping how the organisation builds, deploys, and scales its technology as it grows through acquisitionDesigned a shared VPC/Transit Gateway architecture across ~20 AWS accounts — cutting infrastructure costs while improving security and team velocity.Migrated on-premises services to AWS (ECS, EC2, Lambda, SQS), reducing operational overhead and improving system reliability.Built a greenfield package holiday and cruise rate platform from scratch using.NET, Go, Lambda, SQS, DynamoDB, and RDS.Architected and delivered a direct Travelport Galileo GDS integration, removing third-party dependencies from the flight supply chain.Designed a unified multi-brand website platform on AWS, consolidating multiple legacy stacks into one — reducing duplication and hosting costs.Implemented distributed tracing across the platform using OpenTelemetry and Grafana Cloud, with custom supplier-level instrumentation for real-time performance visibility.Drove significant PostgreSQL performance improvements — identifying missing indexes, tuning RDS configuration, implementing table partitioning strategies for high-volume flight rate data, and deploying read replica strategies that eliminated critical bottlenecks.Led CI/CD transformation from Azure DevOps to GitHub Actions with GitOps Terraform workflows (Atlantis on ECS), reusable composite actions, and automated infrastructure deployment across all AWS accounts.Driving AI adoption across engineering — from developer tooling and documentation automation to RAG-based internal knowledge systems.
EDUCATION
Wirral grammar school for boys
A levels, History computing music
University of Chester
Bachelor of Arts (BA), Business/Marketing
SKILLS
ABOUT BEN CORKER
I\'m a Principal Solutions Architect at a multi-brand UK travel group, providing technical leadership across platform, infrastructure, and engineering practices for brands including Holiday Gems, Destination2, Citalia, and Sovereign. What sets me apart is breadth. I\'ve worked hands-on across the full stack throughout my career —.NET and Go backends, Angular frontends, AWS infrastructure (ECS, Lambda, RDS, VPC networking), CI/CD pipelines, observability with OpenTelemetry and Grafana, and database performance at scale. I don\'t just draw the architecture diagram — I\'ve usually built a fair chunk of what\'s on it. I care about developer experience, operational simplicity, and making sure the architecture serves the business rather than the other way around. More recently I\'ve been focused on AI adoption, cloud migration strategy, and helping the organisation scale its engineering practices as it grows through acquisition
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