Tao Huie-Miles

Profile

I'm the engineer critical outages get escalated to. I look after servers, networks, Microsoft 365 and security alerts for 370+ client businesses, on site and remote. Outside work I designed and run The Foundry: my own AI platform on one home graphics card, with Microsoft Azure as backup, nothing exposed to the internet, and 1,600+ automated checks. I want a role where infrastructure and AI meet: putting AI to work safely inside real businesses, automating the repetitive work away, and owning problems from first call to final fix.

370+client businesses supported
400+devices refreshed across two school sites
35Bparameter AI model I run on one home GPU
1,600+automated checks guarding my AI platform

Experience

Technical Support Engineer · Akita IT

Feb 2025 – present · Maidstone, Kent

Support Engineer for 370+ businesses, part of the team named SDI MSP Service Desk of the Year (SME).

Own the outages. Critical server, network and cloud failures escalate to me, and I take them through to the fix.
First responder on security. Triage detections in Huntress, Defender for Business and Sophos Central: isolate affected machines fast, escalate the serious ones, and pick the quickest safe fix over the textbook one.
Automate the boring bits. PowerShell scripts and Power Automate flows for onboarding and offboarding, tenant admin, reporting and repeat config changes across Exchange, Microsoft 365 and Entra ID.
On site, hands on. Hardware provisioning, rack and patch work, NAS installs and enterprise print deployments (PaperCut, Universal Print).
Networks top to bottom. SonicWall, FortiGate and Sophos firewalls; Aruba/HP, Cisco and UniFi switching. Sometimes the fix is band steering on an access point; sometimes it's phoning the ISP and waiting politely.
Identity and devices. RADIUS failures, 2FA lockouts, and Entra ID / Intune enrolment faults fixed with targeted registry edits, profile repairs and broker account recovery.
Mail that arrives. Deliverability across Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and third-party hosts, with SPF, DKIM and DMARC put right whenever mail lands in spam.
Into the cloud. Help clients deploy and maintain SaaS on Azure Resource Manager as their workloads move.
Invisible maintenance. Out-of-hours patching of Windows servers, backup systems and critical kit, so nobody notices it happened.
Plan ahead. Advise on the fix today and the plan for next year: scoping upgrades and equipment changes before they turn into outages.

IT Network Technician · Tunbridge Wells Grammar School

Feb 2023 – Jan 2025 · Tunbridge Wells, Kent

Led a two-site hardware refresh. 400+ Windows desktops and laptops, interactive classroom touchscreens and iPads, planned and rolled out in stages.
Ran the campus network. Cisco and HP/Aruba switching, with separate VLANs for staff, student BYOD, VoIP and CCTV.
Moved the school off shared drives. Migrated to SharePoint Online and Teams, designed the new security groups and policies, then trained staff in person and stayed for the awkward questions.
400+ smart devices, many tools. Macs, iPads, iPhones and BenQ interactive panels, each family with its own management tool: Mosyle, briefly Jamf, and Apple School Manager for over-the-air profiles and app licensing.
Identity and recovery. Active Directory hybrid-joined to Entra ID, Group Policy, and disaster recovery when it was needed.
Safeguarding online. KCSIE-compliant web filtering (Smoothwall, Lightspeed), with SSL inspection certificates deployed to every workstation.
Physical security. Axxon CCTV and security sensors on isolated camera networks, with video storage kept within retention schedules.
The unglamorous essentials. Cat6 terminated and tested, patch panels and UPS systems maintained, storage health and backups always watched. Also trained staff on Bromcom, the school's new MIS.

Technical Support / Logistics Technician · Optomany (DNA Payments)

2022 – 2023 · Kings Hill, Kent

Kept shops taking payments. Support for EPOS hardware and payment terminals (Pax, Verifone, Ingenico).
Network detective work. Diagnosed payment faults across merchant LAN/WAN: DHCP conflicts, gateway dropouts, packet loss.
Ran the queue. High-impact retail outages first, replacement stock coordinated, gateway partners kept in the loop.

Projects

The Foundry · my home AI platform

Live at seyta.uk ↗Live at seyta.uk

An AI assistant I designed and run on my own PC, with friends using it through a public web chat and Discord.

Hybrid AI. Qwen 3.6 35B on one RTX 3090; when the GPU is busy or the model stalls, gpt-5-mini on Azure AI Foundry carries on the same conversation.
Zero open ports. Cloudflare Tunnel and Access at the edge, and every service checks identity again itself, including verifying Cloudflare's signed tokens.
Real users, real limits. Public multi-user chat with Discord and Google sign-in (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect), an approval queue, rate limits and a daily cloud spending cap.
Agents and tools. An MCP server with 11 tools used by an agent hosted in Azure AI Foundry, a Discord assistant, and an owner dashboard with answer-time and fallback analytics; OpenTelemetry traces in Application Insights.
Measured, not guessed. My own benchmark picks local models by speed and checked accuracy, and found a localhost/IPv6 delay that cut the wait for the first word from 4.15 s to 0.16 s.
Built by directing AI agents. Claude, Gemini and a local Qwen work from a shared ledger and task board under my rules; 1,600+ automated checks in 27 suites, attack tests included, gate every change.

Autonomous drones

Custom-built UAVs with automated landing routines and computer-vision object tracking, running TinyML models on small, efficient hardware.

Circle of Fifths MIDI assistant

A Python app (CustomTkinter) that listens to a MIDI keyboard, analyses chord progressions in real time and suggests voicings.

Local AI dev stack

An earlier testbed on Docker (WSL 2), LM Studio and OpenHands for trying local models on code refactoring and documentation.

Skills

AI & automation: Local LLMs (LM Studio) · Azure AI Foundry · Model Context Protocol · AI agents · OpenTelemetry · Python · FastAPI · PowerShell · Power Automate · n8n
Cloud & identity: Microsoft 365 · Entra ID · Active Directory · Group Policy · Azure · Hyper-V · Google Workspace · Cloudflare Tunnel and Access · OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect
Networking & security: Cisco · HP/Aruba · SonicWall · Fortinet · Sophos · Defender · Huntress · Ubiquiti UniFi · VLANs · VPNs · DNS · SPF, DKIM and DMARC
Endpoints: Microsoft Intune · Windows Autopilot · Mosyle · Jamf · Apple School Manager
Hardware & systems: 3CX PBX / VoIP · Teams Phone · Axxon CCTV · PC and server builds · Synology and QNAP NAS · Cat6 cabling · UPS
Service & backup: ConnectWise · Freshdesk · Veeam · ITIL SLA management · Power BI · Dynamics 365