Software engineer with 27 years of professional development, delivery focused with a critical eye on value. A extensively broad repertoire of languages and technical skills from a long career working for companies of all sizes and stages of life. Being able to guide business and their technical teams towards the solutions that best suit their scale and maturity.
Took a hands-on leadership role in a smaller software team of 5. Responsible for emerging data engineering capability supporting the Chief Analytics Officer, accountability for software architecture and solution design across SRE and application development teams, and delivered an Ofcom regulatory switching integration with 99.9% uptime.
Accountable for reporting development progress and service reliability to the exec team. Scaled the department to around 30 personnel with a mix of permanent, contract and offshore staff. Introduced Chat Ops for self-service network operations and containerisation that removed deployment overhead, significantly improving service uptime.
Accountable for maintaining and developing the core platform providing bespoke planning, CRM, billing, and payment collection. Took accountability for hiring and skilling up the team from two to seven developers, and increased service uptime through containerisation and cloud-native technologies.
Part of the operational team accountable for Anatwines platforms availability and scalability. I specialised in supporting the 100+ software engineers in delivering higher quality code, through introduction of static code analysis. Gatekeepers were put in place to prevent new code being merged down which failed to meet expected quality metrics.
Joined as a contract developer and quickly took a permanent role as Project Scrum Master, working with the core hub platform teams. Part Scrum Master for two teams and Product Owner working with project managers to capture requirements and deliver core functionality. Later joined the DevOps team following company restructuring, before taking voluntary redundancy when the company made cuts across all departments.
Asked to return to Eduserv to recover a project — the responsive redesign for the British Red Cross's first aid training website. Worked with the client to establish strong project foundations through style guide and design workshops, built a project backlog, and led the multi-disciplined team to success in a very short time.
Built an article processor engine to perform semantic analysis and metadata extraction across IOP Publishing's archive of half a million physics papers. Engineered a parallel processing pipeline using Mule ESB that reduced estimated run time from several months to days, integrating Mark Logic with the Luxid semantic processing engine to handle the full corpus.
Customisation and development of the ElasticPath e-commerce platform from user story to release. Scrum coached the development team, making key improvements to retrospective and planning processes, and Jira improvements to make burndown tracking possible. Supported product owners in developing a continuous delivery backlog as a sales tool.
Software Engineer for one of Brightpearl's scrum teams, developing functionality in a continuous delivery environment with two-weekly sprints. Stepped up as Scrum Master for a sprint, ensuring successful delivery of a number of features. Delivered key eBay integration features which helped secure a lucrative business arrangement.
Senior Software Engineer leading an existing team using Scrum to iteratively deliver the new functionality required for the 2013–2014 registration process. Architect and principal developer for secure cross-platform communication between legacy Java technologies and the proposed Azure cloud service. Built a client-side JavaScript search engine for instant search results.
Majority of time spent working with a key account as Scrum Master, leading a new team developing web services and integration with a UK banking group for a mission-critical project. Delivered the world's first complete mobile banking application, processing £1 billion in transactions within 6 months of launch with over 1 million subscribers.
Given the opportunity to take the business intelligence part of the business with the remit to provide a more comprehensive and robust solution. Created a small team providing both BI product development and bespoke client reports. Developed a reporting data warehouse with event-based ETL and built up-to-the-minute dashboards.
Responsible for architecture and project delivery. Improved software quality and management process, and delivered software and architectural changes including the introduction of a bug tracking system (Bugzilla) and a clean n-tier architecture. Direct Debit payment integration into the warranties systems.
Worked on numerous projects in different business areas including transport, telecoms and finance, with the majority of time spent developing J2EE software. Built RAC's monthly membership system which took both continuous card payment and Direct Debit, removing the need for bank-owned PDQ machines for one-off payments — a minor project with a 9-month ROI.
Designed and executed a strategy to migrate a growing telco's platform from legacy on-premise systems to cloud-native infrastructure. Reduced deployment frequency from monthly to on-demand, significantly improving operational quality and reducing unplanned downtime.
Introduced Site Reliability Engineering principles including error budgets, toil reduction, and blameless postmortems across development and operations teams. Established on-call practices and runbooks that measurably reduced mean time to recovery (MTTR) across critical services.
Introduced static code analysis across a 100+ engineer engineering organisation for the first time. Surfaced critical and major defects that had previously gone undetected, and implemented quality gating in the CI pipeline to prevent regressions — all without disrupting delivery velocity.
Invited back to rescue a project that had overrun by three months with no clear path to delivery. Diagnosed root causes in both the technical approach and the client relationship, reset the project scope and backlog, and delivered a successful outcome within a further three months.
Grew and shaped engineering, SRE, and data teams from a small startup into a mature organisation. Established career development frameworks, coaching programmes, and technical communities of practice to raise engineering capability across the organisation.
Quality is built in, not bolted on. These practices reduce the cost of change over time and make teams faster, not slower.
Delivery is the only measure that matters to the business. These practices close the gap between writing code and creating value.
Good architecture enables teams to move independently and systems to evolve without fear.
Technology is a team sport. The way a team works together determines the quality of what they build more than any individual's technical skill.
Graduated with a 2:1 Honours degree. Focus on core software development principles, system design, and project management.
Certified Scrum Master (CSM) — Scrum Alliance, 2009
J2SE Developer — Sun Microsystems, 2001