Accountable for over 20 staff across Product, Engineering and Platform Operations.Established a successful product function appointing POs and BAs, building an immediate backlog of new features and maintenance as well as a 6-12-24 roadmap. Brought in tools to communicate the roadmap and strategic direction and allow for feedback both internally and externally with customers. Championed regular user research sessions with a representative subset of the customer-base.Released two major epics from the new roadmap. Collaborated with the business to introduce a third party solution for attendee engagement. Mentored the technical leads in architecting a new serverless cloud-based media mixing and high volume streaming platform.Gave strategic direction and implementation plan for a complete re-architecting of existing .NET platform using serverless first approach with AWS technologies such as EventBridge, Lambda, Opensearch, Kinesis and Cognito. Domain Driven Design concepts such as Event Storming were used across the entire business to understand and re-define domain models and service boundaries.Balanced the prioritisation of the stability of the current platform, championing delivery pipelines and source code unification, the reducing incidents on the platform by over 90% and the release cycle down from 18 months to every 2 weeks on legacy applications. New components used continuous delivery leveraging feature flagging so releases are at the pace of the business.Formed independent and empowered engineering teams, able to develop, test and release independently. Introduced various culture improvements most notably Wildcard Wednesday where the entire department were encouraged to work on personal projects around the theme of improvement. The new mixing and steaming platform was a product of a WW for two of the developers.Technologies used: DDD, EventBridge, Cognito, Lamba, Node.js, Opensearch, Kinesis, C4, PlantUML, GitHub Actions, Selenium, Jira, Canny.io

Build IT Right (BITRConf) is an annual software development conference based in the North East of England established in 2019. With multiple tracks including; Architecture, Development Process, Development Technologies and UX & UR delegates can expect to expand their knowledge in best practices and be inspired by emerging trends.

Directly influential in growing the business form 25 - 120 (80+ technologists) eventually forming an organisational structure promoting a Head of Software Development, Head of User Centred Design and Head of DevOps and Cloud Engineering. Lead multiple pre-sales engagements and directly contributed in multiple successful public and private sector bids. Owner of the organisational Playbook.Undertook a number of consultancy engagements across public and private sector organisations most notably:Newcastle Strategic Systems Ltd.Brought in to lead an Agile Transformation by the IT Director. Accountable for designing and delivering Agile training across all departments. Developed a product roadmap and formed empowered delivery teams with developers, testers, designers and analysts. Introduced test automation and provided training. Mentored SysAdmins to become more DevOps focused ultimately reducing release cycle time from 18 months to every 2 weeks (sprints).
Technologies used: Jira, Octopus Deploy, .NET, SpecflowNHS BSA Digital
Brought in to mentor existing architects and to help re-set the EA function. Ran Capability Mapping sessions across Digital to identify cross-cutting concerns and developed a prioritised roadmap of shared services. Went on to architect and deliver a payment integration with Gov.UK Pay saving over £1M in extension fees.
Technologies used: Java, SpringBoot microservices, AWS, GitLab CI, Jira, Karate Test, C4, PlantUMLNHS BSA Technology
Brought in at the beginning of the pandemic to lead on the re-platforming of the Medicinal Drugs and Appliances system to cope with increased pressure. Used DDD to identify domain models in the current mainframe, Java and Oracle system. Designed an event-driven architecture to strangle weekly batch jobs into real-time data APIs. Brought in UCD specialists.
Technologies used: Java, SpringBoot microservices, AWS, Pact Contract Testing, ElasticSearch, OpenApi 3.0, API Gateway, Apache Kafka, C4, PlantUML

Working across the Barcelona and Madrid office as part of a team responsible for localising and extending the SageOne SaaS product for the Spanish market. I went on to lead a team across multiple time zones to deliver a ubiquitous API for accounting and payroll domains to be used internationally.Technologies used: Ruby, Rails, RSpec, MySQL, jQuery, Jasmine, TDD, Git, Scrum, and Pair Programming, APIs

Developing both legacy and new financial portals used in large public sector organisations. Also working with both internal consultants and external clients to produce client specific modifications to existing financial products.Technologies used: Spring 3 MVC, JSF, Restful Webservices, Hibernate, JPA, TDD, JUnit, Mockito, Maven, SVN

Working in an agile environment as part of a small team within a large development team using scrum methodology and pair programming to deliver an online accounting solution for the SME market. A large part of this was developing a framework/api for rapid international development. This project was developed using Ruby on Rails, test-driven-development and SOLID design principles to achieve a loosely coupled, pluggable architecture.Technologies used: Ruby, Rails, RSpec, MySQL, jQuery, Jasmine, TDD, Git, Scrum, and Pair Programming

Working as the sole developer in a small team of Learning Technologists to provide bespoke applications for e-learning. Also developing integrations between the University’s core business systems using webservices and implementing SSO. More recently developing mobile applications for the Android platform using the Java SDK and for the iOS platform using Objective-C.Technologies used: Java, J2EE, JSF, Persistence API), Seam, Hibernate, Ajax, webservices (SOAP and Rest), PHP, XML, JSON, Android, iOS, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, Apache Tomcat, Glassfish, JBoss, WebLogic.

Reporting directly to the CTO. Development of webservices and EJBs in to large-scale datawarehouses to provide data-mining capabilities and enrichment of data using inference techniques in the investment banking sector. Also front-end development using Seam. JSP, Servlets, JSF and AJax to provide rich web applications for visualisation of mined data coupled with various reporting and graphing tools. Other projects were developing a CRUD application using Hibernate and the Persistence API to provide a web accessible interface into the datawarehouse and customised ETL tools.Technologies used: Java, J2EE (web services, XML processing, JSF (Richfaces, IceFaces), Persistence API), Seam, Hibernate, Ajax, SQL, MySQL, Oracle, Apache Tomcat, Sun Java System Application Server, JBoss.

Promoted Team Leader in May 2007. Operating as team leader to a region-wide bioinformatics support group to provide general and bespoke solutions to research staff at the five northeastern universities, Newcastle, Durham, Sunderland, Northumbria and Teesside. This included translation of biological problems into ones that can be computationally satisfied and large-scale data handling e.g. database design, trend recognition and identifying statistical anomalies. As the only trained software engineer in the group, it was my responsibility to ensure that appropriate development protocols were used such as SVN and Maven repositories and testing strategies.Technologies used: Java (Swing, RMI), J2EE (web services, XML processing, JSF, Persistence API, Hibernate Ajax, SQL, MySQL, Oracle, C# web services, Apache Tomcat, GlassFish Server.