Software developer, technical leader, people manager, conference speaker, cyclist, runner.
Apr 2019 - present | Engineering Lead and Software Excellence Coach | BCG Digital Ventures |
Nov 2017 - Oct 2018 | Vice President, Software Engineering | Movinga |
Jan 2016 - Oct 2017 | Technical Lead | SoundCloud |
Sep 2012 - Jan 2016 | Developer | SoundCloud |
Sep 2011 - Jun 2012 | Developer | Forward Internet Group |
Sep 2010 - Sep 2011 | Developer & Systems Administrator | Jobsgopublic |
Jan 2010 - Sep 2010 | Developer | Alliantist |
May 2009 - Jan 2010 | Consultant Developer | Perform Group |
Jan 2008 - May 2009 | Technical Trainer | FDM Group |
Sep 2007 - Dec 2007 | Trainee Developer | FDM Group |
BA - Classics - 2:1 (University of Oxford, 2007)
BCG Digital Ventures (BCGDV) partners with some of the world's largest corporations to co-found digital businesses, bringing them to the market with high speed and high confidence.
Hired with a dual role, I worked as interim CTO and founding technical team member on a variety of these projects, as well as developing training programmes, workshops, and coaching programmes to improve the capabilities of the engineering department in Berlin and worldwide.
Key achievements:
Movinga is a marketplace which connects people moving home with relocation companies. Operating in a mutually beneficial way - by helping small relocation companies with customer service and marketing, and by helping customers find reliable home movers and insurance providers - Movinga has enjoyed solid growth in its two key markets of Germany and France, and recently entered the Swedish market.
Joining a small engineering team with a lot of legacy software to look after, I was given the remit to expand the team while changing its culture - to be more collaborative, diverse, inclusive, and communicative.
Key achievements:
During my time at SoundCloud, I became increasingly interested in fixing technical and process problems affecting multiple teams. I was able to work on some of these when I stepped into the "Tech Lead" role. Unlike a tech lead at many other companies, I worked with multiple teams to oversee and guide the technical quality of what they were delivering, as well as collaborating with other technical leads and the engineering leadership to initiate and guide projects to improve SoundCloud's technical landscape across the board.
Key achievements:
SoundCloud is a leading audio sharing platform and one of the top 200 Alexa-ranked sites by traffic. Used by audio creators from those at the beginning of their careers to megastars, SoundCloud offers a huge library of varied content. Working on various teams as a senior developer, I had the chance to be part of key projects in SoundCloud's history.
During my time at SoundCloud, I worked with, among other technologies: Rails; Scala and Finagle; Kubernetes; MySQL; Hadoop; Clojure; and React Native.
Key achievements:
Forward Internet Group is a technology company comprising a number of UK technology brands, including uSwitch, Invisible Hand, and Factory Media. Working as a developer within uSwitch's Advice and Innovations team, I was responsible for collaboratively devising, creating and testing new business ideas; maintaining and improving existing personal finance offerings; and creating a new application for the car insurance comparison journey.
Working on a small, self-organizing team of 4 developers, I had the chance to develop software using Rails, Sinatra, node.js and Clojure. I maintained a focus on back-end development while assisting our frontend developer with his work and taking on frontend tasks myself when there is excess demand. I also shared in the responsibility for maintaining and configuring our operations platform, using Puppet and AWS extensively.
I was frequently involved in conversations regarding the management of workflow and allocation of development efforts, aiming to achieve consensus from all team members on what are the priorities and constraints, based both on financial metrics and on our long-term goals for the team and the business.
Whilst working at Forward I continued to speak at conferences and user groups, including Ruby Manor, the London Ruby User Group, and internal development meetings and showcases.
Key achievements:
Jobsgopublic produce some of the UK's best known specialist jobs boards, including jobsgopublic.com, lgjobs.com and myhousingcareer.com. I joined their small team of 3 developers and quickly became productive in all aspects of the role, maintaining and extending a large Rails application and developing new applications and utilities in Sinatra and Rails.
Following the departure of the the systems administrator this year, I shared in the responsibility for maintaining the company's infrastructure, administering mySQL, Apache, MongoDB, Solr, Bind and Jenkins servers.
Key achievements:
Alliantist is a small company specialising in management and business information systems developed in Ruby on Rails, specifically their flagship product PAM, a web application for project and partner relationship management in use across the majority of Probation Trusts across the United Kingdom. During my time with Alliantist, I was responsible for developing new features as well as heading second- and third-level support of the application.
Key achievements:
As the first of FDM Group's consultants placed at Perform, I fulfilled a dual role; first and foremost to become familiar with and develop Perform's technologies, but also to assess the level of technical competence and the skills required for a newly-trained consultant developer starting at the company. I was successful in both tasks, working on a variety of projects whilst at Perform and assisting in the entrance of another consultant to the site via a programme of learning I devised in liaison with Perform's technical management.
Working on websites for high-profile clients such as EMI and the Women's Tennis Association, I developed my knowledge of XML, Javascript and Spring, and also learnt XSLT and the use of Perforce for version control.
Key achievements:
FDM offers newcomers to the industry an excellent first job, providing training followed by work with their clients as junior consultants. After quick progress through the training programme, I was quickly asked to become one of FDM's first 'Mountie trainers' - a junior role on the training team, delivering the training I had just received while continuing my own personal development. I taught both in formal workshops and informally as a mentor, teaching new entrants programming in bash with a Hangman game project, relational database design and development with a data migration project in Oracle, and teaching the principles of object-oriented design and development in Java.
Key achievements:
I'm a keen runner and cyclist. Things I'm proud of here include my 10k time (39:11), my half marathon time (1:27:29), and my Marmotte finishing standard (Gold). If none of that means anything to you, that's OK. I promise not to talk about it too much.