Lincoln, England, United Kingdom
20+ years in software engineering and tech leadership. Hands on with back end engineering, cloud and DevOps. Passionate about tech and the people behind it. Crazy about building teams where people feel valued and love being part of. Relentlessly data driven.
• Lead the development team in delivering complex software solutions at the intersection of fintech and life sciences, 2 heavily regulated industries, balancing fraud prevention with the strict privacy requirements of clinical trials. • Ensured good value from vendors including cloud services. I cut the AWS bill by more than half in my first month with the company without any cuts to quality or availability. • Pulled together key company data into Power BI reports connected to various data sources so for the first time they could get a snapshot of how many payments were being processed, through which providers and for which customer, data which was key for everyone in the business including the board packs. • Identified the key skills the business needed in engineering and simplified the team to be more suitable for the current challenges of the business and the right size for the current runway. • Improved the engineering culture through listening to people, being honest about what could realistically be achieved and bringing together different people in the business to help everyone build better professional relationships with each other, despite being a fully remote team. • Onboarded 3 new huge customers for the business including upselling additional professional services, leading the development team in building new integrations and delivering sandbox and production environments on time. • Oversaw the introduction of key AI projects both for internal efficiency and within the product itself. • Oversaw the maintenance of the ISO 27001 accreditation as well as the businesses journey towards SOC2.
• Leading the architecting and re-write of the SaaS application from its initial proof of concept, ready to scale and be used by large events and venues across the world. The main features were a react front end application hosted on S3 and Cloud Front with WAF for protection and an API Gateway proxied to lambda functions for the back end, supported by AWS RDS Postgres Databases, a Kafka event stream a Valkey Cache and again WAF for protection. • Building a high performing cross functional product team through recruiting great people, inspiring them through my own passion for technology, introducing and mentoring them in the SCRUM methodology, testing and cyber security and empowering them to make a difference! • Used DORA to drive the product team to deliver a higher quality product and more frequently. By embedding test strategies combined with a well architected and expandable application, we deployed multiple times per week, had low change failure rate and a lead time for change of under 7 days. • Meeting with customers during sales pitches to help convey the benefits of the application, during pre-contract to meet the cyber security criteria particularly of the larger organisations and throughout their time with Iventis both when they were happy with the product and wanted to provide feedback and when the relationship was not at its best. • Provided clear and concise communications to both the whole company at monthly all hands meetings and when attending board meetings to update on the roadmap, digital strategy, revenue budgets and proposed capital expenditure for funding rounds. • A comprehensive digital strategy including a product roadmap informed by market trends and what the customers need, a cyber security plan effective enough to protect the organisations reputation, accreditations including cyber essentials plus and ISO 27001 and a multi-cloud strategy to host sensitive data in country, even where AWS our main provider did not have a region.
I was bought into Iventis to provide structure to the engineering process, expertise in engineering and cloud and mentorship for the very junior team they had there. I excelled at all of these aspects which quickly resulted in me taking on more and more responsibility in the business, eventually resulting in my promotion to Chief Technology Officer to better reflect the roles and responsibilities I then had.
During my short time with LSEG, I worked on an application which hosted an extremely large data set, ingesting billions of records each day of stock exchange and other distributable data through the organisations API’s. My achievements during this time included: • Worked as a lead developer on a worldwide cross functional development team of 40, navigating language barriers, time zone differences and silo challenges. • Designed, costed and created a proof of concept a solution which would replace the relational database with a NOSQL solution potentially saving the organisation hundreds of thousands of pounds each year.
Digital space is a managed service provider and the product I was working on was a self-service customer portal. My achievements during this time included: • Building a team from scratch to replace the legacy application teams, ready to build something new. This included mostly graduates and one more experienced engineer. I introduced them to the SCRUM methodology, supported them in their first jobs in the software industry, mentored them in their technical design and implementations and guided them through effective line management into a great team! • Bridged the gap of understanding between the business on both what was possible with the product and the differences between how the business predominantly worked with waterfall and how the development team preferred to work to deliver value quicker with SCRUM. • Worked with other business leaders to develop a roadmap for the product based on their understanding of the customer and how they needed to use it. • Designed, architected and worked on the customer portal application which integrated with ServiceNow to show customers their tickets and service requests, but also with many other 3rd party API’s such as Vodafone, BT and TalkTalk to automatically provision and update services including mobile phones, leased lines and broadband. • Onboarded and managed an additional offshore team to take care of the internal support of the ServiceNow application, after identifying a lack of skill both within the business and amongst applications at a budget which was acceptable to the business.
At Bellrock I was working on a range of both new and legacy web applications as part of a team of 25 permanent and contractor engineers, both on and offshore. My main achievements here included: • Understanding the code behind the legacy applications, some of which had not been touched for a long time and getting them to the point where they could be changed and deployed to deliver value to their users. • Exceeding expectations by quickly delivering new features of a high quality and focusing on the department’s key performance indicators such as how quickly we responded to support requests.