London, England, United Kingdom
I lead the very small engineering function at Melomaniac, building out the new platform from inception, driving architecture and delivery of the initial MVP offering. The focus was on strategic planning and establishing long-term beneficial patterns and technology, while meeting the tight deadlines and delivering value incrementally. This project required a pragmatic approach to both creation and deployment of the product due to very tight financial and time constraints, using IaaS over cloud and a lot of base devops work to automate the platform infrastructure.
Adfin is on a mission to get SMEs in the UK paid faster, and I was able to join and help build and grow their new platform as a full stack lead engineer. I helped improve the CD pipeline and data capture for the performance monitoring in Datadog, planning and delivery of new features and third-party-integrations across the platform. As part of maturing the payment platform, I led a small project to re-architect the internal structure of the Spring based transaction management and to lay the foundations to replace the unreliable event system with a Spring driven outbox.
My second role at JPMorgan is an as-of-yet unannounced greenfield cloud project that is aiming to revolutionize how individuals and organisations think about banking. I was part of a small team delivering a critical, high-impact, high throughput component of the system capable of processing hundreds of millions of requests and events per day. As a lead engineer I am actively shaping design decisions, contributing code for new features and refactoring existing parts of the system for better maintainability and higher throughput, as well as working with the product owners to prioritize features and discuss ideas. Another aspect of the lead engineer role is mentoring of other engineers from junior to senior level and collaborating with other teams to facilitate integrations with other systems. I have also lead the team for topics relating to observability and SRE topics.
As part of the Payments team I was part of a small engineering organization to build and maintain the integration platform to process client payments and integration with third party systems such as Mobile Network Operators (MNO), Transaction Screening and the bank’s Core Banking System (CBS), using a variety of protocols with both synchronous and asynchronous integration patterns. We also maintained and extended our customer facing UI, based on React. Evolving from a startup, a big part of the responsibilities included preparing the platform for the scale up of the business, breaking down our core monolith and improving performance of the overall system. I was leading the initial efforts of the engineering org to establish an Engineering Platform to evolve our devops responsibilities and streamline the engineering experience. I was also mentoring the engineering organization as a SME for infrastructure and integration tasks, and supporting cross org initiatives, like a complete overhaul of our CI/CD pipeline and the migration of our services into containers. Notable projects: • Restructuring of the central Consul service to address security concerns and preparing the services to make use of its service mesh capabilities • Integration of Foreign Exchange trading platform using FIX protocol • Establishment of Engineering Platform, revisiting our CI/CD pipelines (switching from Buildkite to Github Actions), reworking our IaC (terraform/ansible) repositories to support ephemeral environments and address security concerns • Establishment of cross org observability platform
I joined project Dynamo at an exciting phase of the development of the new digital consumer bank ’Chase UK’ and have been involved in delivering the bank’s card payment processor and dispute platforms, launching successfully in fall 2021. We made heavy use of reactive web services built on Spring Webflux, as well as asynchronous processing using Apache Kafka. Maintaining one of the most critical paths for our customers, the focus of the team were reliability, resilience and performance, while maintaining a fast pace in iterative feature delivery. That included strict adherence to code quality, several layers of tests (unit, component, integration, end-to-end and non-functional/performance), code reviews and technical/architecture discussions with the team, while trying to streamline our processes as part of a newly regulated organization. My role as a full-time developer included design, implementation and support of existing and new services to grow our platform, and analysis of production issues and performance bottlenecks across our application and infrastructure stack. Notable projects: • Delivery of core functionality of card payment processing (Authorisation / Clearing) • Design and delivery of disputes platform (Chargebacks / Second Presentments) in an iterative approach • Performance testing and improvements to the platforms throughput, increasing the supported load by x100 on the same amount of pods (optimizing queries, indices, and kafka configurations) • Deep dive investigation of connectivity issues with istio, resulting in platform wide fixes to infrastructure configuration • Full rewrite and upgrade of the team’s outdated terraform modules