Douglas Shearer Email & Phone Number

Medify is used by 1000s of students to prepare for medical entrance exams. Medify has been focussed on widening access to medical and dental schools since 2009.My initial focus in this role was to modernise engineering practices within the company, and hire additional engineers to free up existing engineers to share their knowledge of the platform and tools. I also analysed needs within the business, and set strategic direction for the engineering team.- Worked closely with other business leaders in the company to align on strategy and ensure their needs are met.- Introduced agile working practices and continuous delivery to provide regular feature updates to product.- Implemented a process with Product to build a pipeline of new features and improvements.- Made strategic decisions regarding technology choices, with a strong focus on developer productivity.- Hired for engineers, increasing the size of the development team 3x.- Kicked off a project to implement infrastructure-as-code, replacing error-prone manual setup and configuration.

I co-host a podcast about tech, mainly AI and web related, with my friend and collaborator, Iain Wallace.

Remote

Wondr Medical provides services to medical education, medical communication, and clinical trials. Products include a medical education platform, a collaborative medical imaging tool, and a messaging tool used for many things including patient pathway outreach as part of clinical trials. I led the hiring process for engineers and assisted with recruiting for other roles within the company, managing and mentoring a 14-person engineering team. My responsibilities also included close collaboration with the Head of Product, UX designers, the data team, and leadership to ensure that customer needs were met.I had an instrumental role in overseeing the technical aspects of compliance, achieving audited standards like GDPR, HIPAA, Cyber Essentials Plus, SOC 2 Type 2, and actively working towards ISO 27001. Collaboration with our finance team to ensure accurate HMRC Research and Development Tax Credit applications, reflecting the work undertaken accurately.My responsibilities were broad and included managing a hardware product development project, encompassing everything from the initial design to the prototyping of the final device. I also supervised the creation of a React Native mobile application for both Android and iOS as a companion for our web-based medical communication service.I developed automation of per-developer or per-feature staging environments, including deploys triggered directly from within Github Pull Requests. This also involved moving many applications to Docker containers running on AWS ECS Fargate, enhancing our infrastructure's flexibility.Finally, I hired for a QA role, a strategic decision that led to an increase in code quality and a notable reduction in deployed defects. This improvement stemmed from the implementation of best practices, learned and applied by the entire team, creating a more robust and reliable development environment.

Remote

Responsible for the backend API, and operational aspects of the Wondr Medical platform.So far at Wondr Medical I have: implemented a large-scale video ingest, processing, and delivery system; participated in the implementation of an analytics system, the output of which is used for targeted advertising, as well as content recommendation; and improved operational systems to empower other engineers on the team to safely and confidently make application and infrastructure changes.The primary tools are Ruby with MySQL for web applications and data processing. AWS, Chef, and Terraform are used to manage infrastructure.Wondr Medical is a platform which supports the education of medical professionals, and helps medical publishers and advertisers improve their reach and relevance.

Remote, Glasgow.

Engineering and product management. Helping Distrify Media provide services to customers in over 160 countries.In 2017 I oversaw a drive to make month-to-month costs lower and more predictable. Costs were reduced by 60% in total. Transitioned encoding pipeline from Amazon Elastic Transcoder to a custom setup using FFMPEG on Amazon EC2 Spot instances, resulting in a 97% reduction in encoding costs while maintaining or improving quality. Separation of source and transcoded video files to make use of Amazon S3 lifecycle rules to reduce storage costs. Use of Amazon Lightsail instances as a transparent proxy for external CDNs, considerably reducing bandwidth costs.Took part in attracting investors, including travel to China for meetings with potential investors and partners.Co-authored multiple successful grant applications, with awards given by the EU Creative Europe Media Programme, Innovate UK, and Scottish Enterprise.

Remote, Glasgow

Engineering and product management. Helping Distrify Media provide services to customers in over 160 countries.Oversaw an overhaul , in 2015, of Distrify Media's VOD platform. Transition and complete shutdown of all legacy systems completed early 2016. Playback, encoding, logging, analytics, reporting, and accounting were all reconsidered, redesigned and rewritten. This new much leaner platform allows Distrify Media to make changes in response to market demands in shorter timeframes than before, with decreased risk that existing services and features will be interrupted.Overhaul included compliance of VAT MOSS, the Europe-wide implementation of VAT on digital goods.

Remote

Day to day development of user-facing features and third party integrations.Payments integration of Worldpay and Gocardless into an existing payments and order infrastructure.Automation of infrastructure. Implemented a full Chef configuration system, scripts and infrastructure to bring up new nodes quickly. Replication and failover of MySQL database servers. Log collection, parsing, and search using Graylog2. Stats collection and display using Statsd and Graphite.

Remote

Development of new features on a large-scale multi-discipline activity analysis application. Initial implementation targeted ball-sports such as football, basketball and rugby. Users would tag events and players in video from multiple angles, and later search these events, build complex relationships between them, and generate statistics and reports based on the data.

Glasgow, United Kingdom

Design and implementation of application features for high profile clients including Morrison PLC and Glasgow Museum of Transport.

Remote

Development of social network for K12 age children.

Remote

Site development.

Remote

Start - April 2008: All development and maintenance.April 2008 - End: Scaling, Uptime, R&D.

Remote

Design and implementation of applications features for high-profile clients including Williams F1 and Endemol Entertainment.