Darren Cotterill Email & Phone Number

Frenchs Forest, New South Wales, Australia

Assisting Year 11 and 12 classes learn Python Programming as part of their Software Engineering HSC course.

Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Sydney

Led the Software Development Team at Optiver, building low latency trading systems for the financial markets across Asia. Optiver is a private trading company and market maker using custom built software to obtain a competitive edge.Over time, the Development Team consisted of 10-15 sub-teams, focussing on Exchange Connectivity, Auto-trading Strategies, Trading UIs, Trading Risk, Core Trading Infrastructure, Middle Office Reconciliation and Quality & Continuous Delivery.After 5 years of growth, and a major re-structure, I split my role so I could focus on the core systems technology shared by the Trading groups, to allow me to remain connected to the work with a manageable team size of ~40 developers.Key Achievements- Sustainably grew the team from 30 to 100+, whilst improving standards, team culture and dev practices.- Persisted to embed a quality culture, improving the maturity and efficiency of delivery, whist reducing risk to Trading.- Key leader, along with the CEO and Local Management Team to introduce a 'Tribe and Squad’ based organisational structure (inspired from Spotify), to address communication and prioritisation issues, and setup the organisation for planned growth.- Significantly changed the dev team from a private culture to be more involved in the community. Brought in meet-ups (such as YOW! nights) to be hosted internally, which led to many more groups following.- Pushed technical innovation to move from only C++ and C# to Python and Go where appropriate and even some Haskell experiments.- Drove a CD initiative to use modern tooling to automate the provisioning of environments and pipelines for building, testing and releasing software.- Improved team cultures by promoting agile practices and collective code ownership, from the initial single person ownership model.- Introduced Innovation Days to allow developers to be creative and technical prototypes in one day. Led to several initiatives being followed through to production ideas.

Worked for ThoughtWorks for multiple clients across Australia providing consulting services, in the roles of Senior Developer to Project Manager. The majority of engagements involved a significant amount of coaching and enablement for Agile development and project management practices and principles, dealing with both IT and business stakeholders.I led teams that have varied from 4-5 cross-functional team members to over 20, consisting of project managers, business analysts, developers and testers. Some work has involved off-shore teams with ThoughtWorks India.In the Project Management roles, I was been responsible for agreeing commercial terms with the client, project planning, budgeting and reporting, scope management, and people leadership.Voted by the ThoughtWorks consultants to be a member of the Australian Leadership Team, representing the voice of the consultants to the management team. This allowed me to build my leadership skills and to gain a better insight into the commercial and management aspects of running the consultancy business.

Bsc, Computer Science

Education record