Chief / 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. I'm responsible for architecture, engineering quality, infrastructure, and platform engineering. Their legacy systems were failing to scale and created severe productivity issues when making changes. I started by running a programme to stabilise the 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. Azure and dedicated 3rd 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 I mentored the teams on adding extra automated quality control approaches to reduce manual testing. Through optimisation and new technology Sonovate can effortlessly process twice the throughput and is now funding more than £1b per year.
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. I worked with the analytics team to ensure a scalable and best practices approach was taken for data ingestion from the services into our new Snowflake data warehouse.
At ASOS I was responsible for optimising the engineering teams within multiple product groups and the AI group. I mentored my teams in engineering, architecture, quality, distributed systems, infrastructure and platform engineering. I participated in hands on delivery and pair programming to support the engineers and led by example to initiate process or technology changes.
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. I presented a case study at the Microsoft Build conference after the projects live release.
Led an emergency 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. We facilitated scaling from gigabytes to terabytes of telemetry per day.
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 have a passion for photography, especially analog which helps bring together my love of nature and adventure. I process, scan and print aiming to do larger formats over time. I also maintain and repair my old cameras and lenses. I'm also into music and Hi-Fi, cycling, climbing and travel.