Fort Lauderdale, Florida, United States
I am an experienced and passionate software engineer and manager with a proven track record of building and leading highly effective development teams. I favor Agile methodologies with a focus on team empowerment and collaboration. I am passionate about Functional Programming, API design, distributed systems and Reactive, event-driven architecture. I enjoy rapidly prototyping solutions and then developing them into robust, highly scalable applications. Above all, I love seeing my work make a difference to real life issues on a daily basis. As a result I tend to prefer working on continuously deployed applications. I enjoy working with other passionate, intelligent people. As a manager I particularly enjoy helping people overcome challenges and develop their full potential. Skills: Engineering Management · Servant Leadership · System Architecture · Distributed Systems · Google Cloud Platform (GCP) · Active Listening · Coaching · Data Engineering · Big Data · Machine Learning · Microservices · Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) · Agile Methodologies · Scrum · Java · Test Driven Development · Kubernetes · Scala · REST · Software Development · SQL · JSON · Git · Github
Managed and worked on the Selection team of the Messaging department, a cross-functional agile team of backend and data engineers that owned around 20 microservices and 60 data pipelines that powered Spotify’s Messaging Platform. Also managed other teams in addition to Selection for a total of 18 months to cover manager staffing gaps, including the Reachability and Audiences and Attributes teams, both of which were core teams essential to the Messaging department. My responsibilities included providing technical leadership and architectural guidance, staffing these teams, maintaining team energy and focus, collaborating with product managers to develop product visions, objectives and roadmaps and providing regular progress reports to senior management. Also responsible for ensuring alignment, collaboration and knowledge-sharing between Selection and various other engineering teams at Spotify both within and outside Messaging. Key Achievements: Hired 9 engineers in 2022 including 3 women, one non-binary person and 1 African American. Sat on the Disability Inclusion company working group and collaborated with this group to publish an Inclusive Events guide. Onboarded and provided buddy coaching for three new engineering managers.. Led the Messaging Platform Unification initiative which merged 3 separate messaging systems into a single platform powered by ML-optimization, significantly simplifying the architecture and simplifying the messaging tools for marketers. Tech Lead for the Messaging portion of the Automated Content Marketing Bet, a company-wide project that resulted in significant increase in MAU. Led the Fleet Management initiative in Messaging with the goal of allowing bots to make code changes and deploy them with full automation Led the Messaging on-call group responsible for providing 24/7 support for the Messaging platform.
I manage and work on the Core Services and Identity & Access Management (IAM) teams. My responsibilities include hands-on coding, staffing these teams, maintaining team energy and focus, collaborating with product managers to develop product visions, objectives and roadmaps and providing regular progress reports to senior management. As the line manager of developers on these teams I was responsible for managing their career progression, mentoring/coaching, quarterly performance reviews, etc. Core Services Technologies: Scala, Play, Akka/Lightbend, Actors, Cassandra, Amazon Kinesis, REST APIs, Reactive Programming, Docker IAM Technologies: Java, OAuth/OpenId Connect, OpenAM, LDAP/Open DJ,, REST APIs, JSON Web Tokens Other Skills: Agile, Scrum, Soft Skills(Mentoring, Coaching, Leadership), Budgeting, Interviewing Key Achievements: Currently overseeing a cross-departmental effort to roll out OpenId Connect authorization across the organization. In the process of implementing eventing onto Amazon Kinesis for many of the Core microservices, allowing decoupling of these services, better analytics integration and a more Reactive architecture. Led a cross-departmental initiative to remove dependencies on legacy cookies which were blocking the IAM team from making business-critical performance improvements to sign-in. Designed and helped to implement a Notification service which leveraged Amazon Kinesis to gather notification events from multiple sources and provided a JSON REST API to serve these notifications to multiple different clients. Collaborated with multiple teams to develop and implement a load testing strategy to prepare for the business-critical winter diet season. Collaborated with internal recruiters to develop an effective recruitment process, including writing job descriptions, creating phone and face to face interviewing scripts and designing coding exercises. Also mentored several developers in interviewing practices.
I managed and worked on multiple development teams responsible for various services essential to the Guardian website., including the Content API, Discussion and Identity. My responsibilities included hands-on coding, staffing these teams, maintaining team energy and focus, collaborating with product managers to develop product visions, objectives and roadmaps and providing regular progress reports to senior management. As the line manager of developers on these teams I was responsible for managing their career progression, mentoring/coaching, quarterly performance reviews, etc. Key Skills/technologies: Scala, Play, Scalatra, Elasticsearch, Oracle/Postgres SQL, Mongo, REST APIs, JSON, Thrift, AWS(EC2, CloudFormation, SQS, SNS, Kinesis, Lambda, Cloudwatch, Route 53), Agile, Soft Skills(Mentoring, Coaching, Leadership) Key Achievements: • Oversaw and helped implement the migration of all services onto Amazon EC2, removing the need for a local data centre or a support/operations team. • Worked with Content API team to improve its performance and stability, reducing errors from a daily basis to <1 a month and increasing uptime to >99.99% • Oversaw the reduction of publication lag, the delay between content being published and becoming available in the Content API, down to <5s from >30s. • Oversaw creation of a new Avatar service which included an avatar moderation workflow and managed millions of user avatars. • Worked with other developer managers and senior management to define and implement processes across the department including a career progression framework, performance/promotion/renumeration review processes, internal recruitment process, teleworking and reduced hours policies and many other policies and processes. • Worked with other mangers and developers to more than double the number of developers in the department over a 2 year period.
I lead the Core Website team which was responsible for the Guardian's main website which received over 6 million unique browser hits per day. In addition to supporting and maintaining the website the team I responsible for creating several microsites for 3rd party content and various widgets for displaying sports data, weather, etc. Key Skills/technologies: Scala, Java, JavaScript, HTML, Scalatra, Lift, Spring, Hibernate, Oracle/SQL, Velocity templates, Google App Engine, REST APIs, JSON, XML, Agile, Scrum Key Achievements: • Added advertising to viideos, generating substantial revenue. • Added video recommendations, dramatically reducing bounce rates on video. • Created custom pages, widgets and interactives/games for the 2012 Olympics. • Created custome pages and widgets to support sport data including live scores, league tables and team/player/match statistics pages. • Collaborated with other teams to migrate the website to theguardian.com domain.
I joined Alfresco’s Services team which was responsible for a variety of different services and APIs, including workflow integration, web content management, a Rendition service, an Invitation service for inviting users into security groups via email and a Form service for automatically generating web forms from a data model. I was also appointed the go-to guy for all workflow-related work including integration with JBPM and Activit. Key Skills/technologies: Java, JavaScript, Spring, Hibernate, SQL (mainly Postgres), JSON, XML, Concurrency/Futures, JBPM/Activiti workflow, CMS, Document Management, Web Content Management, Agile, Scrum Key Achievements: • Implemented Alfresco’s integration with Activity workflow, a new open source workflow library complying to the BPMN 2.0 standards. • Wrote a chapter on Alfresco’s JBPM integration in the book ‘Alfresco Professional’. • Spoke at several conferences about Alfresco’s workflow integration. • Implemented Workflow and Task form processors which automatically generated web forms for a given workflow or task. • Helped implement a Rendition service for automatically processing large batches of images.