Ben D. Email & Phone Number

London, England, United Kingdom

Working in the Platform team, working on maintaining and implementing all RustServices, as well as optimisations of existing Python services.• Created Rust service for running background jobs. Integrating with existing jobmanagement logic, as well as providing automatic dependency injection of databaseconnections and deserialisation of job parameters.• Lead fortnightly talks for the engineering team and company. Topics range from testingand best practices to competitors and outage post-mortems.• Took on the responsibility to mentor and lead RegTech engineers, teaching them bestpractices and providing them with peer programming and review opportunities. Thishas resulted in engineers moving over into the Platform team.• Refactored background job handling logic to reliably identify non-responsive jobs andimprove job parameter handling and deserialisation. This also implemented checkingjob declarations at startup ensuring any misconfigurations are discovered immediately.• Migrated existing data ingestion service from a 2-year-old nightly release to stableRust. This required replacing an unmaintained framework with an alternative that stillmet requirements.• Proactively identified and fixed suboptimalities in docker builds, cutting image size byup to 50%.• Extended linting and typechecking of the codebase. This involved fixing all existingviolations as well as providing education on how to avoid future issues. At timesrequiring upstream contributions to ensure linters could be used effectively.• Refactored configs/templates access logic to increase reliability and massively reducethe need for special casing logic. This clearly defined failure modes and identifiedexisting violations, allowing them to be fixed before being encountered by customers.• Improved integration of CI pipeline results with GitLab merge requests, automaticallypresenting linting and test results, as well as highlighting code coverage in diffs.

London, England, United Kingdom

Worked in the R&D Team, working on migrating an internal support service to Kubernetes and rewriting a core media layout engine in Rust.

Durham, England, United Kingdom

Maintain and develop the Union’s technological capabilities and requirements.• Manage the Union’s Google Workspace services• Maintain the Union’s WordPress website

Durham, England, United Kingdom

Birmingham, England, United Kingdom

Intern working on modernising and expanding a service allowing customers to upload files and link them to GitHub Issues and Zendesk Tickets.• Migrated file storage to use Google Cloud Storage instead of local storage, thus allowing removal of old backup methods and serving download links with built-in expiry.• Removed reliance on NGINX for serving static files. This was in preparation for deploying on Kubernetes.• Rewrote integrations with GitHub and Zendesk to use newer authentication methods, as well as interacting via objects instead of passing raw JSON. Following this I refactored the commenting logic to use these new integrations and jinja2 templates for the comments themselves.• Migrated service from isolated GitHub repository to a SRE shared GitLab monorepo. This also involved creating GitLab CI pipelines for running tests and linters, as well as for deploying the service to various environments.• Split up deployment secrets to give services access to only the services they require. This also involved removing the need for multiple copies of secrets locally while developing.• Created a bash script for easily deploying various dev versions of the service, including local Kubernetes deployments as well as on a development cluster on GKE.• Set up a portable container-based development environment with preinstalled dev requirements and various other utilities such as the Google Cloud SDK.

Birmingham, England, United Kingdom

Software Engineer at StarLeafInterned in the Cloud R&D Team, working on internal monitoring and tooling.• Created a Salt provisioned Grafana container to display per colo dashboards. These presented calling statistics such as customer feedback scores as well as resource usage for each machine. Data was retrieved from across multiple Graphite and Elasticsearch instances.• Refactored stats gathering and chart generation for the internal statistics pages. This standardised how statistics were requested and how the charts were retrieved while reducing the amount of repeated code. These changes allowed stats to be retrieved in the background (using celery) easily which resulted in page load speeds increasing for almost all statistics pages.• Expanded Salt certificate generation for containers to have the same functionality as the certificate generation for machine images.• Created landing page for 3rd party tools, such as Grafana, which did LDAP based authentication for those tools.• Converted internal customer/log analysis tool to use Redis for caching results.• Added StarLeaf cloud wide monitoring of Redis instances.• Added charts of customer feedback scores to internal statistics pages. These were generated from values retrieved by elasticsearch-dsl from Elasticsearch.

Watford, England, United Kingdom

Interned in the Cloud R&D Team, with a focus on the integration of 3rd party software/plugins (such as Outlook 365 & Slack) with the StarLeaf cloud. • Testing lead for all 3rd party integrations.• Rewrote existing test plans and developed new ones to ensure a high standard of quality in shipped code.• In conjunction with the team lead, responsible for the configuration of the global beta cloud, such as coordinating the versions under test.• Coordinated testing new versions for all cloud components in addition to 3rd party integrations during periods of planned absence by the team lead.• Trained other interns in testing both the StarLeaf cloud in general as well as specifically the 3rd party integrations. • Created a system to track how specific defects affected changes to test cases for 3rd party integration testing that resulted in wider changes to the overall test process. Closely involved due to the effectiveness of my system being a core motivator.• Maintained and reworked test walls containing over 40 hardware endpoints used by the test team during both an office move and usual business workload, ensuring the layout was easy to use and extend in the future. • Used Python and Bash to automate aspects of existing manual test plans to improve speed and reliability of testing – Some of this functionality has since been added to cloud management tools used by the DevOps team.

Bsc Mathematics And Computer Science, Natural Sciences

Third Year Modules: Analysis, Geometry, Operations Research, Parallel Scientific Computing and Security Engineering Second Year Modules.

A-Level, A*, A, A, A

Gcse