This has been one of my most rewarding roles and a great opportunity in both my career and personal development. It saw me bring all that I had learned over the last 8 years at the company, things like what worked well and what didn’t and allowed me to set a direction that has made it stronger, more resilient and a better place to work. I brought the focus back to the people and what made them happy and what was important to them like leadership, personal development, and working all the improvements that were talked about but never happened. It changed the question of "why aren't we doing" it to a "what do you need for us to do" itKey initiatives:- staff hiring, onboarding and retention- product roadmap and technical debt- security in both standards and upgrades

During this role, I still remained the backend lead while also taking the reins on all our project technical architecting. This involved cross-team technical support and ensured a thorough understanding of requirements and specifications for rail projects.

Building on my previous team lead role, I was in charge of all the backend estate and architectural decisions. This included planning sessions for all backend projects, 1 to 1s. I was also tasked with ensuring tech debt was being worked on and released promptly. Project highlights were Flexi Seasons and our Whitelabel offerings

After promotion to team lead, I continued to build functionality for our rail clients. A highlight project was to build a new version of our smartcard offering, bringing smartcards to our latest client South Eastern Railway. I provided mentorship and guidance to the team and conducted agile sprint planning, 1 to 1s as well as hiring new developers

My primary responsibilities were building out the customer, orders and payments for the retailing of train tickets to two of the largest rail operators in the UK. It involved the creation of backend APIs written in a Scala stack to support our web and app services. We worked in small teams using agile processes with daily scrums and 2-week sprints.Tech Stack: Scala, slick, akka, Rabbitmq, MySQL, REST APIs, Jenkins, microservices

- Develop and maintain in a LAMP environment REST API services, admin processing portal and receipt processing services.- Liaise with the company directors to identify and prioritise business requirements and turn them into technical specifications.- Coordinate and mentor a team of 2 developers using Agile approaches such as daily scrums and sprint planning. - Prioritise backlog work and ensuring fortnightly sprints are delivered on time.

- Integration with network APIs using cURL, Soap and Restful services- Design and develop features on the front end website using open source technologies- Develop and maintain the administration site using Zend framework- Use of continuous integration tools such as phpUnit, CasperJS and Jenkins- Extensive use of agile development with daily scrums and sprint planning

VB6 and VB.Net Developer working on the company's B2B product.- Design and develop new systems to improve the Netfira product in VB.NET and T-SQL.- Review and repair legacy code in VB6, Java and PHP- Conduct research into new technologies and make recommendations for their use - Implement secure payment features through third party payment gateways such as PayCorp, USAEpay- Designed and developed web based administrative systems used in-house for payments and reporting- Maintenance and administration of infrastructure which included apache servers running MySQL and PHP and Tomcat servers running Java servlets.