cover image

Career Profile

I am a highly motivated technology leader specialising in building high-performance software engineering teams. I am currently heading up an award winning UK-based retail investment application on both iOS and Android. The key to my success comes from aligning product and technology practices into harmonious teams capable of designing, building and running desirable software applications in highly-regulated environments.

The majority of my experience is in developing evolutionary architectures which help to keep up with ever-changing customer and business needs. My most recent build for a UK-based investment application involved leading the full development process, from designing and building a cloud-based serverless architecture to implementing continuous integration and delivery pipelines. As part of the build, I recruited a talented team of developers, ensuring their passion and expertise aligned with our goals.

I am deeply passionate about finding the right balance between technical correctness and the need for agility to meet the evolving demands of users. I strongly believe in using rapid iteration and user testing to drive product development forward. By embracing a culture of continuous improvement, I ensure that the application undergoes iterative cycles, allowing teams to refine and enhance it based on valuable user feedback.

I recognise the importance of making tasks autonomous and effortless. By automating and simplifying repetitive processes, developers' time and energy can be focused on generating real value, enabling them to be laser-focused on making the application desirable. This boosts efficiency and empowers developers to unleash their creativity, resulting in a more captivating user experience and a team of passionate and motivated engineers.

Experience

Head of CMC Invest

2023 - present
CMC Invest, London, UK

I am currently heading up CMC Invest, a UK-based investment app, allowing users to buy and sell shares, ETFs and mutual funds commission-free, within self-invested personal pensions, ISAs and general investment accounts. I am responsible for the strategic leadership, product development and technology oversight of the application and general day-to-day running of the business, including regulatory compliance, market analysis and competitive oversight.

I lead a highly talented team of engineers, product managers, designers and marketing roles; fostering collaboration, innovation and continuous learning.

Head of Technology

2020 - 2023
CMC Invest, London, UK

My role encompassed the choreography of the event-based architecture, enabling scalability and seamless integration of cutting-edge technologies. I fostered a culture of continuous improvement by promoting agile practices, including continuous integration and delivery, resulting in rapid and reliable software releases. Through feature flagging techniques, we facilitated controlled rollouts and experimentation, driving product innovation and user satisfaction.

The success of our cloud-based and serverless architecture enabled us to achieve unprecedented levels of scalability, fault tolerance, and cost efficiency. By empowering the development team, I ensured a focus on creating innovative functionalities while maintaining code security, scalability, maintainability, and adaptability.

Technical Principal

2019 - 2020
Contino, London, UK

Working in the energy industry to help to move dependencies on large monolithic SAP deployments to AWS native services. Utilising cloud native technologies to bring insights and analytics of energy consumption to the customer in real-time.

Designed and implemented agile processes and architectures for software development to further improve productivity, quality and developer experience.

Led a team of software engineers in developing a new energy product and React Native mobile application for both iOS and Android.

Principal Consultant

2018 - 2019
Contino, Melbourne, Australia

Working with high profile clients including leading banks, telecoms and health insurance companies to help them utilise the cloud in the most efficient and cost-effective way.

Designed and co-built a financial crime screening system to scan millions of data points in seconds, making use of containers deployed in AWS and event-based communication.

A major focus on the culture and sociological dynamics involved in developing cloud native systems and adapting to new DevOps pipelines and processes.

Co-designed a bank's first set of serverless and container based APIs deployed into AWS.

Tech Lead

2016 - 2018
Kantar, London, UK

Designing and leading the development of a polyglot microservice based automation system, developed using Node.js, .NET Core, Redis, MongoDB and RabbitMQ, deployed on Azure and prototyped using Docker Swarm and Kubernetes. Promoting the use of event-based service choreography to create an easily extensible solution capable of being scaled globally with lightning fast response times.

Increased the productivity of the development teams by creating automated deployment pipelines incorporating build, test, deploy and fast feedback, enabling the teams to code and deliver to production in the same day, with zero downtime.

Employed the use of feature flags to release new functionality to a smaller group of users and reviewing feedback before releasing features to the entire user base, ensuring the quality of the system at all times whilst not having an overwhelming release process.

Choreographed microservices allow for additional functionality to be added to the system very quickly, this allows for rapid prototyping of ideas as well as being able to react very quickly to the changing requirements of the business. The use of containers allowed new environments to be created in minutes, promoting the constant testing of new features and regression testing of the existing system.

Business Solutions Development Manager

2015 - 2016
Kantar TNS, London, UK

Managed a team of five developers, mentoring their career development through setting objectives specific to their aspirations and the requirements of the business. By developing a team relationship based on trust, team members could work exceptionally well together, putting team based goals first .

Our successes came through the quality of our developments and the increased improvement in our processes. Originally our deployments would take between one or two days to complete, by improving our continuous integration capabilities that was improved to almost instantaneous deployments.

In addition to the onshore, team I lead a team of offshore developers to build systems and encouraging them to try out and use new technologies within those developments. Lead a group designed to encourage innovation across the company by creating an internally open source approach to development.

Business Solutions Architect

2013 - 2015
Kantar TNS, London, UK

Responsible for the architectural design and development of the company’s most important software tools, used worldwide for many of the world’s leading companies.

Designed and developed an OAuth 2 based single sign-on platform used across the globe for internal systems, allowing users to seamlessly work on multiple applications and share information between them.

Head of Software Development

2011 - 2013
Bluecube Technology Solutions, Milton Keynes, UK

Designed and developed an online portal for a major UK children’s charity to organise and administer the completion of their nationwide award scheme.

Leading a team of six developers we also designed and developed an online messaging system for one of Ireland’s largest virtual office companies.

Software Developer

2010 - 2011
Bluecube Technology Solutions, Milton Keynes, UK

Designed and developed an online portal for a major UK children’s charity to organise and administer the completion of their nationwide award scheme.

Systems Developer

2006 - 2010
Volkswagen Group, Milton Keynes, UK

Designed and developed a number of in-house applications, including vehicle and transport scheduling systems.

Open source projects

event hub sidecar - A sidecar container that can send events from ActiveMQ to containers via REST APIs
api gateway - A simple to use, sub-millisecond API Gateway for your microservice application.
damage report - Report on your artillery load tests and fail your builds if they do not meet expectations.
runtime-migrate - MongoDB database migrations run at startup to help with continuous deployment.

Skills

AWS
Kubernetes
CI/CD
React
Javascript/Node
Go
Docker
SQL / NoSql
Azure
Serverless
API
Event-based architecutre
Microservices
Requirements elicitation
Team leadership
Agile methodologies
Innovation management
Domain driven design
GCP / Firebase
Real-time data streaming

Certifications

AWS Solutions Architect Associate
CKAD