Mark Ashton Email & Phone Number

Lichfield

Responsible for infrastructure to support our suite of websites, during my time at Existent we have migrated from metal servers to an architecture that is both highly available and scalable, sits across multiple cloud platforms, and leverages the best of Google Cloud, AWS, Heroku, Rails and WordPress.I have a strong passion for data and it’s analysis, ensuring all parts of the business have access to the analytics & business intelligence they require, in a format that is suitable. Whereas some people may be happy with graphs, I aim to allow others to leverage Artificial Intelligence such as that provided by Cortana to speak to the data directly. I have also utilised open source big data sets, such as the NDT data provided by M-Lab and hosted on Google BigQuery, to analyse and publish global broadband download speeds.I oversee the design and development of tools to help users search products using filtered search, and tools to help in users decision making, such as financial calculators. A strong area of research has been in understanding how gamification can assist in our transition to Next Generation Intermediary. My end goal here would be the use of projection tools to predict and advise how a user’s life may change long term based on a small change now. An example of this would be “How would my retirement be impacted if I stopped going out to eat every weekend, and used the money saved to overpay my mortgage?”

Derby, United Kingdom

Working as lead engineer for a team of 35 System Design engineers with a first line of 4 team leads reporting into me. With a budget of £3 million per year, the team delivered safety critical engine control and monitoring systems for Rolls Royce engines for use on Airbus and Boeing aircraft. Accountabilities included delivering to plan and budget, interfacing with the customer, ensuring adherence to process and the appropriate airworthiness standards, and providing technical oversight and guidance to team members.Previous roles within Rolls Royce have included IPT lead, drumbeat lead, developing fast and efficient code, and both unit test and integration test. Languages used include ADA and LUCOL (a low level library of assembler macros), with testing performed in IPL ADATest for unit testing, ES37 ( a proprietary integration test environment) and a variety of jet engine simulators.

London, United Kingdom

IT Strategist and Technical Consultant to various internet startup companies, developing a focus on server hardening on UNIX & LINUX platforms (Redhat, Debian and FreeBSD). Types of activity included developing custom kernels for FreeBSD, speccing and deploying server platforms, and guiding highly creative though non-technical clients to achieve their dream solutions.

London, United Kingdom

Via the now defunct Digital Design Works in Fulham, London, worked as a software architect and lead developer for a gambling odds comparison website. During this time I developed a multi-agent, multi-threaded back end system that processed XML feeds from a number of book makers to feed a dynamic MySQL database. The design was such that the database schema would adapt in real- time to the content of the XML feeds, creating new tables when a new sport or sporting event appeared, dropping tables automatically after an event, etc. Java servlets were used to present the information, allowing a customer to click on the best odds and be taken direct to the book makers site to place their bet.

Master’S Degree, Artificial Intelligence

As part of my MSc in Artificial Intelligence I worked at Psygnosis in Camden, London, developing a multi-agent planning system for use.

Bachelor’S Degree, Computer Science, 2(Ii)