Head of Engineering for H&B Tech’s Supply Chain group.

Head of engineering, overall architect, and application integration lead for Privacy Analytics and Linguamatics, two global IQVIA companies.Expanded existing Engineering organisation to include Privacy Analytics, another IQVIA-owned company, taking my span of control to 12 teams, 3 software architects, 11 managers, and in the region of 90 staff. I am leading overall engineering and architecture efforts for 7 product lines, and hiring experienced managers and senior staff. Additionally, I engaged in further technical due diligence for potential acquisitions and was named in a major national-level contract as applications integration lead.

I designed and led a major reorg of four existing departments (Development, Solution Development, Resource Development, Test) into a unified NLP Engineering group of 60+ staff and 5 product lines. This involved creating and mentoring junior managers, extending L&D activities across the new group, implementing Scrum across 10 teams to replace legacy pre-agile processes, and leading monthly All Hands meetings to build culture and share knowledge. This organisation covered 6 countries, 4 time zones, and 8 major skill families (JavaScript, Python, Java, C++, NLP, AI/ML, QA Testing, linguistics)I went on to build relationships with the IQVIA Global Development Centre on-site in Bangalore, expanding my in-house offshoring to create a Release Engineering team to replace legacy CI tooling.In this role, I was a line manager to managers, tech leads, a programme manager, and the mentor to several peers in the Product Management organisation.

Joined 6 months after acquisition to manage the 15 engineers of the Solutions Development team, covering three product lines and two major technology stacks (Python+Django, React+Node).Managed full employee lifecycle (role definition, hiring, promotion, probation, termination) and full product engineering lifecycle (ideation, creation, maintenance, sunsetting) across on-premise and hosted deployment environments. Led the group into remote working during the pandemic, tracking sustained increases in overall productivity throughout 2020 and beyond. Created new products including a SaaS API platform on K8S, a curation tool, and a white-label search interface toolkit. Engaged in technical due-diligence for potential IQVIA acquisitions. As a member of the career model committee, contributed to technology career paths.Renewed agile best-practises within the team to increase throughput and decrease time-to-market, including differentiation between Scrum and ScrumBan where appropriate. Created two new Scrum teams to meet business needs.Created and mentored two new junior managers. Mentored new Product Owners from a different group. Implemented team-wide learning & development activities including O’Reilly Learning Platform access and Tech Video Hour.

Headhunted by Lucidworks to manage the integration of the recently-acquired Twigkit product. Direct line manager to the existing Twigkit engineering team; responsible for hiring new engineers, performance management, and coaching of existing engineers. Applied agile project management techniques, integrating the team’s processes with those of the wider Lucidworks engineering team. Practised process debugging, moving the team from a Scrum-based process to Kanban to increase responsiveness and better match business needs. Contributed heavily to wider engineering process debugging exercises.Worked closely with Product Management to design new products, write user stories, manage stakeholders and communicate progress. Managed four major new product releases, two of which were based on existing Twigkit prototypes. Supported and enabled field teams.Made significant hands-on technical contributions, driving unit testing and code quality by way of servant leadership.

As Head of Big Data Platform Applications, I am responsible for all six IDOL platform applications:- Find/Business Intelligence for Human Information, our open source, dual-stack (IDOL and Haven OnDemand) end user application that provides both basic search and advanced BI analytics.- IDOL Admin, a lightweight embedded IDOL administration tool- IDOL Site Admin, a heavyweight IDOL datacenter management tool- IDOL Data Admin, a "data administrator" tool for managing search optimization and natural language question answering- IDOL Collaborative Classifier, a legacy Java Swing application for managing IDOL categorization- Haven Search OnDemand, a suite of cloud applications for managing and searching Haven OnDemandI have presented at two conferences - the 2015 and 2016 HP/HPE Big Data Conferences:- 2015: Haven Search OnDemand, a joint presentation- 2016 Haven OnDemand, a joint presentation- 2016: Customizing Find, a solo live coding demonstration that showcased our open source search interfaceI am involved in the recruitment process for hiring new software developers, typically getting involved at the CV screening stage and running the technical interview - often solo.I have written copious amounts of customer-facing documentation in the form of administration guides and installation guides for the products in my portfolio.I have constantly pushed a philosophy of continuous improvement, championing the adoption of emerging tools and technologies such as Git, Vagrant, and Jenkinsfile-based build automation. As the local GitHub champion I have encouraged uptake of modern tooling in other teams, while also leading an open-source-where-possible effort that has seen us release several libraries and an entire search application to the world under the MIT license.Recognising the need for more coherant development processes, I led my team into the adoption of Scrum, Jira, and the Git Flow development methodology.

Presented Haven Search OnDemand on stage at HP's annual Big Data Conference. Met customers, partners and prospects in the developer lounge, a place designed for getting customers direct access to the technical folk behind the products.

Led the design and architecture of IDOL Search Optimizer, an IDOL administration application that targets the "data administrator" user persona.Led the design and architecture of Find, an open source end-user search interface for HP's IDOL OnDemand/Haven OnDemand API platform.Led and managed the development of IDOL Search Optimizer into a dual-stack application that targets both HP's IDOL on-prem platform as well as the Haven OnDemand cloud API platform.

Head of Frontend + Demo Team.Responsible for smooth running of the sales demo network - roughly 270 virtual machines running HP Autonomy IDOL and a variety of web applications, ranging from product to technical showcase demo.Led the user interface design and development of:- IDOL Admin - a lightweight, built-in IDOL management user interface (Backbone.js, Require.js)- IDOL Site Admin - a web application for managing an IDOL datacenter (Backbone.js, Require.js, Java, Spring)Built numerous new sales demos, including the proof-of-concept of IDOL OnDemand, which grew into HP's Haven OnDemand API platform. Grew a new dedicated team to work on IDOL OnDemand.Started interviewing new job candidates for my team and other teams.

Led the redevelopment of the sales demo network. Migrated physical servers on a mix of operating systems onto a standard set of VMware Linux VMs. Developed basic Bash deployment tools for Autonomy IDOL, improved our Nagios monitoring system by cleaning and standardising configuration and checks.Led the redevelopment of the demo portal, a web application for accessing the sales demos, and the development of a partner access portal/CMS. Architected the development of a demo management CMS for controlling portal content and sales collateral.

- Lead development of internal HR system, utilising Autonomy LiquidOffice, Microsoft SQL Server, Java, JavaScript for a year- Worked on mission critical internal sales system (ASP.Net, ASP.Net AJAX, VB.Net, Microsoft SQL Server, Windows Server, JavaScript) for two years.

Graduate software developer, worked on:- Proof-of-concept Blackberry application- Autonomy Investigator, legal hold web application- Autonomy LiquidOffice, process management web application- Autonomy Teleform, form processing system

One-to-one IT tutoring, generally for mature students. Marking of IT coursework (e.g. European Computer Driving License)