Chief / Staff / Principal Software Engineer
I am a multi-disciplinary, strategic, and pragmatic engineer with a passion for both engineering within teams and working across an organisation to optimise teams, processes, and value. I am most comfortable in a workplace that is energetic, explorative, passionate about programming and fun. I take the quality of my work seriously, employing best practices and up to date approaches to make likable code and reliable solutions.
Sonovate is an invoice factoring financier specialising in funding for the labour market. They had existing legacy systems which were failing to scale and difficult to change resulting in a degraded customer and operations team experience and severe productivity issues when adding features or attempting to optimise. We started by running a programme to stabilise the existing systems, established a hiring process focused on the needed skills to begin a re-platforming project utilising microservices and improved testing to address the problems of the original system.
A new domain driven architecture was created to support their future growth and technology selected to support a microservice approach. Azure Kubernetes Service was used alongside distributed system approaches to allow the system to scale and self-heal when issues arose. Both Azure and dedicated third party services such as Chargebee and Auth0 were leveraged to ensure engineering time was spent on features contributing to Sonovate USP. To allow safe and productive changes to the services contributing to financial features and funding extra automated quality control approaches were introduced. Manual testing was minimised in favour of automated testing from unit tests to end to end testing.
The core engineering team of platform engineers and principal software engineers were my direct reports. Together we built the cloud infrastructure, automated provisioning and deployment systems, telemetry, dashboarding and alerting. Responsible security principals were adopted and built into the infrastructure and automated. We integrated ourselves into the product engineering teams to assist and mentor on architecture, distributed systems design, root cause analysis for complex issues and to assist in challenging domain areas. Platform tooling and a microservice framework were iterated on based on the needs of the teams. We worked with the frontend and analytics teams to integrate features into core packages and the framework to make product team integrations easier.
Led an initiative with Microsoft and the ASOS AI platform to implement a recommendations product with an early access version of Azure ML. This was pioneered alongside the introduction of Azure Kubernetes Service within ASOS. The focus was on providing the data scientists and machine learning engineers ways to release python first prototypes and solutions to production balancing strong engineering principals with fast iterations and feedback. We presented a case study at the Microsoft Build event after the projects live release.
Led a task force to stabilise and scale up the elastic search telemetry platform. Built and mentored a new dedicated monitoring platform team. This ensured ASOS had accurate, lower latency and reliable telemetry to assist in root cause analysis, alerting and monitoring.
Introduced Azure Kubernetes and Azure Service Fabric within my product areas to reduce the cost of microservice deployments and improve engineering efficiency. The automation for these deployments were then made available to other product areas for reuse.
Frequently contributed in cross product group war rooms to assist with root cause analysis on severe time critical platform issues.
Upper Second Class with Honours
I spend time outside of work reading the latest technical blogs, blogging about technology, spiking out ideas and learning new platforms. I love both consuming and creating music and actively play guitar. I have further interests in traveling, photography, cycling and PC gaming.