United Kingdom
I currently lead Engineering for the Business Integration, Digital Channel Services, Open Banking and Digital Platforms functions (circa 400 staff) for the Cloud, Digital and Integration CIO. My teams provide enterprise middleware for integration across the company, back end services for Nationwide’s Banking App and Internet Bank, industry APIs for Open Banking and provide digital platforms across AWS, Azure and on premise to support all of the above. More generally I have over twenty five years' experience of delivering business critical, high-performance systems at scale for both on-premise and cloud based solutions. A former developer, since 2010 I have been in various Architecture/Design/Leadership roles responsible for developing solutions using in-house teams as well as in collaboration with third party development partners such as Microsoft, Accenture, IBM etc. Previously I have undertaken core design/architecture roles on a diverse range of projects such as Mobile Banking, Open Banking, Faster Payments, Mobile Payments as well as regulatory projects such as the Payment Council's Payment Services Directive, 7 Day Current Account Switching Service and PCI Data Security Standards compliance. While at IPL/Civica I worked on a range of projects across a diverse set of industries including finance, transport, health and government customers.
I lead multiple large teams (circa 400+) of software and platform engineers across Nationwide’s Integration, Digital Services & Industry API Platform domains covering a wide variety of projects. My teams provide enterprise middleware for integration across the company, back end services for Nationwide’s Banking App and Internet Bank, industry APIs for Open Banking and digital platforms across AWS, Azure and on premise to support all of the above. The estate consists of a mixture of mainly Java and .NET based APIs, microservices, event driven systems and workflow processes utilising AWS, Azure, Apigee, Kafka, MongoDB, SQL Server and Cassandra. As well as the usual project demands such as rapidly adding features to Nationwide’s banking app, we are currently re-engineering Nationwide's diverse middleware and Digital estate on to a hybrid cloud (across AWS and/or Azure) architecture. Services are deployed to AWS/Azure and on-premise on various flavours of Kubernetes and Istio Service Mesh. I am Responsible for... - Leading several large multi-disciplinary teams of both permanent and supplier engineers - Collaborating with Enterprise Architecture on strategy and architectural roadmaps - Providing engineering leadership, technical direction and oversight - Acting as the design authority assuring complex solutions - Making appropriate technology choices - Defining and ensuring adherence to standards - Overseeing technical debt and vulnerability management processes - Ensuring applications, platform components and infrastructure remain evergreen - Accountable for approving and assuring any security dispensations and waivers - Accountable for owning and managing any technical risks, issues, etc. - Articulating technical issues to both business and IT stakeholders at the C-suite level - Line managing, coaching and mentoring my senior leadership team of 13 Lead Engineers - Leading the engineering activities on projects/portfolios with budgets in the order of £30-60m.
Reporting to Nationwide's Cloud, Digital and Integration CIO, I lead a large team (currently 200+) of software and platform engineers in Nationwide’s Integration & Industry API Platform domains across a portfolio of projects. As well as the usual project demand we are currently refactoring and re-engineering Nationwide's diverse middleware estate into a cohesive set of services and on to a hybrid cloud (AWS) architecture. Services are deployed to AWS and on-premise on various flavours of Kubernetes and Istio Service Mesh. The estate consists of a mixture of mainly Java based APIs, microservices, event driven systems and workflow processes utilising AWS, Apigee, Kafka, MongoDB and Cassandra. Responsible for... - Leading engineering teams across multiple departments with multiple stakeholders - Leading large multi-disciplinary teams of both permanent and supplier engineers - Collaborating with Enterprise Architecture on strategy and architectural roadmaps - Providing engineering leadership, technical direction and oversight - Acting as the Integration design authority assuring complex solutions - Making appropriate technology choices - Defining and ensuring adherence to standards - Overseeing technical debt and vulnerability management processes - Ensuring applications, platform components and infrastructure remain evergreen - Accountable for approving and assuring any security dispensations and waivers - Accountable for owning and managing any technical risks, issues, etc. - Articulating technical issues to both business and IT stakeholders at the C-suite level - Line managing, coaching and mentoring my senior leadership team of 9 Lead Engineers - Leading the engineering activities on projects/portfolios with budgets in the order of £20m-£30m.
In this role I lead a large team of 160+ software and infrastructure engineers in Nationwide’s Integration domain across a portfolio of projects. As well as BAU project change we re-engineered Nationwide's old ESB middleware estate into a set of containerised APIs deployed on Red Hat's OpenShift container platform and utlising OpenShift Service Mesh. The estate consists of a mixture of mainly Java and .NET based APIs, microservices, event driven systems and workflow processes utilising AWS, Kafka and MongoDB. Responsible for... - Leading large multi-disciplinary teams of both permanent and supplier engineers - Collaborating with Enterprise Architecture on strategy and architectural roadmaps - Providing engineering leadership, technical direction and oversight - Acting as the Integration design authority assuring complex solutions - Making appropriate technology choices - Defining and ensuring adherence to standards - Overseeing technical debt and vulnerability management processes - Ensuring applications, platform components and infrastructure remain evergreen - Accountable for approving and assuring any security dispensations and waivers - Accountable for owning and managing any technical risks, issues, etc. - Articulating technical issues to both business and IT stakeholders at the C-suite level - Line managing, coaching and mentoring my senior leadership team of 9 Lead Engineers - Leading the engineering activities on projects/portfolios with budgets in the order of £20m-£30m.
Responsible for... - Producing high level designs/technical architecture documents for internal and external development teams - Providing architectural leadership throughout the entire project lifecycle - Overseeing the design and development phases of projects including task management, governance and design assurance - Acting as the overall design authority on projects - Providing architectural consultancy across all stages of the software development life cycle - Taking full responsibility and accountability for the technical architecture within a project or programme of work, ensuring the architecture addresses the concerns of all stakeholders - Participating in pre-sales meetings, demonstrations and proposals leading to new work - Authoring the technical elements of bid work across a wide range of industries, problem domains and technologies - Provision of design estimates for projects from rough orders of magnitude at the initial phases through to detailed estimates - Architecting solutions that used a wide range of technologies including .NET, Java, AWS, Azure, JBOSS Fuse, SQL Server, MySQL, and IBM MQ - Designing solutions that are low latency, high throughput, scalable, highly available and highly secure
Responsible for... - Leading the technical analysis, design and quality assurance for Wintel payments systems projects in Nationwide's Payments Development Centre - Production of high level designs for both internal development teams and third party development partners. - Leading the technical analysis and detailed design phases of projects - Line managing a team of Technical Analysts and System Designers within Nationwide's Technical Analysis and Design department - Chairing and participating in Design Authorities both at a department and company wide level - Collaborating closely with Nationwide's Enterprise Architecture and Programme Architecture functions to ensure project technical designs align with the Society's architectural roadmap and strategy. - Estimation, resource allocation, planning, knowledge management, mentoring.
Responsible for... - Production of high level technical designs in the Payments area of Nationwide for both internal development and for third party suppliers such as Microsoft, TCS and Infosys. - Designing solutions that are low latency, high throughput, highly scalable, highly available and highly secure - Line managing a team of System Designers within Nationwide's Technical Analysis and Design department - Collaborating closely with Nationwide's Enterprise and Programme Architecture functions to ensure project technical designs align with the Society's architectural roadmap and strategy. - Providing design leadership throughout the entire project lifecycle - Provision of design estimates for projects from rough orders of magnitude at the inception phase through to detailed estimates - Overseeing the detailed design phase of projects including task management, governance and design assurance - Sitting on and chairing Design Authorities both at a department and company wide level - Providing design consultancy through the entire development lifecycle to projects and programmes of work within Nationwide Projects - Nationwide's implementation of the Payments Council's 'Paym' scheme (Mobile Payments) - Enhancements to Nationwide's Current Account Switching Service - Production of Payments Gateway middleware solution allowing both strategic and legacy systems to hook into the Faster Payments scheme - Provision of new BizTalk based payments processing solution for new SAP Core Banking Ledger - Nationwide's implementation of the Payments Council's Current Account Switching Service