AVAILABLE IMMEDIATELY

Marc Marquez

IT Infrastructure and Operations Engineer

ABU DHABI, UAE

I've spent 18 years in IT infrastructure and operations across the Philippines, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Most recently I was a NOC Engineer at Momentum, handling incidents across Azure, AWS and on-premise systems on a 24/7 rotation.

Before that I spent ten years at two Dubai holding groups, Meraas and Shamal, running Microsoft 365, identity, servers and security projects.

I also run an eight-VM lab where I practise Linux, Ansible and monitoring tools, and I write up what breaks.

Open to cloud and infrastructure operations, DevOps, and AI automation roles in the UAE and international remote positions. Available immediately.

EMAIL ME ↗CALL ME ↗GITHUB ↗LINKEDIN ↗DOWNLOAD CV ↓

BASED IN

Abu Dhabi, UAE (UTC+4)

STUDIED

Electronics and Communications Engineering

OPEN TO

Cloud & infrastructure operations · DevOps · AI automation
UAE & international remote positions

BUILD / OBSERVE / LEARN

Selected projects

SIGNALINFRASTRUCTURE / AUTOMATION / OBSERVABILITY

LAB - 2026

Project SIGNAL

Infrastructure Automation & Observability Lab

VIEW LAB ARCHITECTURE ↗

Lab project, not a production system.

A home lab I built to practise the work behind a NOC: building servers, deploying with Ansible and watching them with real monitoring. Eight virtual machines on VMware (seven RHEL 9.5 and one Windows Server 2022) run a small game service behind nginx, with RabbitMQ, MySQL and Redis. Prometheus, Grafana and the ELK stack watch all of it.

13 Ansible roles, tag-scoped plays, secrets in Ansible Vault
GitHub Actions builds the application on every push
7 of 7 exporters up in Prometheus
5,955 Windows event log documents in Elasticsearch within minutes of starting Winlogbeat
4 dated journals of what broke and how it was fixed

RHEL 9.5WINDOWS SERVER 2022VMWAREANSIBLEPROMETHEUSGRAFANAELKDOCKER COMPOSEGITHUB ACTIONS

READ THE PROJECT ↗

CLAPCLAP-ACTIVATED PERSONAL ASSISTANT

ORB ICON · BRANDING CONCEPT

PERSONAL PROJECT - 2026

Project CLAP

A desktop assistant I'm writing in Python. It wakes on a double clap or on "Hey CLAP" and gives a spoken daily briefing: Abu Dhabi weather, laptop health, forex rates and today's Google Calendar. A small local model running through Ollama handles conversation and interview practice. One design rule: the model only talks. Anything that does something on the computer goes through a separate module with minimum permissions and a spoken confirmation.

version 0.7, still in progress. Double-clap activation is more reliable than the wake word for now.

PYTHONOLLAMAGOOGLE CALENDAR APISPEECH RECOGNITION

READ THE PROJECT ↗

VitalOFFLINE-FIRST HEALTH TRACKER

FLUTTER / ANDROID

PERSONAL PROJECT - 2026

Project VITAL

An offline-first health tracker for Android, built with Flutter. It logs weight, calories, protein, fasting hours and steps, shows trends and a goal progress ring, and supports CSV import and JSON backup. All data stays on the phone. No account, no network.

FLUTTERDARTHIVE

READ THE PROJECT ↗

18 YEARS IN IT

Experience

MOMENTUM CORPORATE SERVICES LLC

NOC Engineer (L1/L2)

Yas Island, Abu Dhabi · Sep 2025 to Oct 2026

First and second-line incident response on a 24/7 rotating shift across Azure, AWS and on-premise infrastructure.
Took incidents from logging through triage to escalation to L2/L3, DevOps and SRE teams, in Jira Service Management, against SLA.
Rebuilt the team's Grafana dashboards and monitoring workflow.
Wrote runbooks the team used for incident response and routine procedures.
Ran Datadog and Dynatrace proof-of-concept tests during the team's monitoring tool review.

SHAMAL HOLDING

Specialist, Digital Workplace Services

Dubai · Sep 2020 to Aug 2025

(A Dubai holding group in real estate, hospitality and leisure.)

Administered Microsoft 365 (Exchange Online, SharePoint, Teams) for about 2,000 users on the company's own tenant.
Helped split Shamal's IT from Meraas's shared infrastructure, including setting up Entra ID Connect directory sync between the new on-premises Active Directory and the cloud tenant.
Administered the on-premises VMware environment: vCenter, ESXi hosts, HA/DRS and the VM lifecycle.
Brought the user base to full MFA coverage and reconciled accounts against active-employee and leaver lists.
Set up and configured ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus (categories, SLA rules, workflows, approvals, dashboards) and deployed a Copilot Studio self-service bot that answered policy questions, showed basic IT troubleshooting steps and could open a ticket.
Directed the daily work of three IT Support Engineers as the senior on the team.
Supported executives and VIP users, including boardroom and Teams meeting support.

MERAAS HOLDING

Specialist, Workplace Services

Dubai · Aug 2015 to Aug 2020

Configured and supported Microsoft 365 for about 3,000 users.
Field IT support across the group's leisure, hospitality and retail sites, and direct support for senior executives.
Built and maintained the standard Windows image for the endpoint estate, deployed with Acronis.
Handled incidents, requests and changes against SLA.

Earlier experience 2008–2015 / +

Unlimited IT LLC, IT Support Engineer (managed services), Dubai, Mar 2014 to Aug 2015. Supported several client environments, migrated client email from on-premises to Office 365 and set up new client offices (domain, email, network).
Tata Consultancy Services, IT Infrastructure Engineer, Taguig, Philippines, Aug 2013 to Feb 2014.
Arabic Computer System, IT Support Engineer, Saudi Arabia, Oct 2010 to Jul 2013. IT and network support for the Saudi Aramco client project.
Festival Supermall Inc, Computer Hardware Engineer, Philippines, Nov 2009 to Aug 2010.
Trend Micro Inc, Technical Support Engineer (Anti-Virus), Philippines, Aug 2008 to Nov 2009.

EDUCATION

Mapua Institute of Technology

Now Mapúa University

BSc Electronics and Communications Engineering
Manila · 2001–2006

CERTIFICATIONS

Microsoft credentials

Listed as active on my Microsoft Learn transcript · Checked 31 October 2026

Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect ExpertEarned 15 Jul 2026 · Valid through 16 Jul 2027
Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator AssociateEarned 15 Jul 2026 · Valid through 16 Jul 2027
Microsoft Certified: Azure FundamentalsEarned 21 May 2020 · No expiry listed
Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate: Office 365Earned 15 Jun 2015 · Legacy credential · No expiry listed
Microsoft Certified ProfessionalEarned 16 Apr 2012 · Legacy credential · No expiry listed

VERIFY MICROSOFT TRANSCRIPT ↗

Other certifications

CompTIA Security+Issued Oct 2024 · Valid to Oct 2027
ITIL v4 FoundationIssued Mar 2025 · Valid to Mar 2028

Earlier: Cisco CCNP Routing and Switching (expired 2019).

FIELD NOTES / FROM THE LAB

Incident write-ups

Real failures from my home lab. What broke, what caused it, and what I learned.

Storage errors with two causes

NVMe I/O timeouts and XFS filesystem shutdowns took down three VMs mid-session. I found two separate causes: host memory overcommit from running eight VMs plus a new Docker stack, and VMs that were too small (about 1.6 GB each) and already swapping.

OPEN LAB JOURNALS ↗

A note that said it worked

My architecture notes recorded windows_exporter as live. It wasn't: no service registered and no binary on disk. The earlier working state was almost certainly a foreground process that a reboot erased. I found it by checking instead of trusting the note.

OPEN LAB JOURNALS ↗

A symptom three layers from its cause

A package install on nginx01 failed with "No package vim-enhanced available". The real cause was that the host had never been registered with subscription-manager, the only one of seven in that state.

OPEN LAB JOURNALS ↗

Four bugs behind one broken connection

The first Ansible play that needed WinRM to the Windows server hit a wrong ansible_user, a global become=True in ansible.cfg, pywinrm not installed on the controller, and win_template not rendering Jinja2 because of a version mismatch. Each one hid behind the one before it.

OPEN LAB JOURNALS ↗

A first automation run kept small on purpose

The first Ansible run against live hosts was limited to --tags common, because the vault did not exist yet and the app-tier roles read credentials from it. Running everything would have been faster, and wrong.

OPEN LAB JOURNALS ↗

TOOLS & TECHNOLOGIES

Tech stack

Technologies I use across infrastructure, operations and personal projects.

Cloud & virtualization

Azure

AWS

VMware vSphere

Docker Compose

Identity & workplace

Microsoft 365

Active Directory

Entra ID

ManageEngine ADManager Plus

ManageEngine ADAudit Plus

Monitoring & observability

Azure Monitor

AWS CloudWatch

Grafana

PRTG

Datadog

Dynatrace

Prometheus

ELK

AI & automation

Claude

Microsoft Copilot

ChatGPT

Notion

n8n

Automation & delivery

GitHub

Ansible

GitHub Actions

PowerShell

Systems & services

Windows Server

RHEL 9.5

nginx

RabbitMQ

MySQL

Redis

Patching & endpoint management

Microsoft Intune

Ivanti

BigFix

Networking & VPN

Cisco access switches

Cisco Meraki

UniFi

OpenConnect VPN

Azure VPN

Cisco VPN

IT service management

Remedy

Jira Service Management

ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus

ServiceNow

ConnectWise

Security & data protection

Microsoft 365 email security

Microsoft Defender

CrowdStrike

Carbon Black

Trend Micro

Sophos

Zscaler

Microsoft Purview

Barracuda WAF

KnowBe4

BeyondTrust PAM

Development

Python

Flutter

Dart

Hive

THE PATH HERE

About me

I started in 2008 in technical support at Trend Micro in the Philippines, then worked in Saudi Arabia and, from 2014, in Dubai. Most of that time has been spent running IT for businesses: help desk, servers, Microsoft 365, identity and security projects. The NOC role at Momentum was my move toward operations and reliability work, and the lab is where I keep learning it.

Certifications: Azure Solutions Architect Expert, CompTIA Security+, ITIL v4 Foundation.

Email me at marc@malmarquez.com.

Call: +971 56 127 9757 (UAE)
+63 949 786 6630 (Philippines)