I started in the newly created role of director of engineering in Cubic in 2020; during the first of what would be any lockdowns. That's a lot of people to get to know over Teams.My job is look after the engineers in Cubic and help them grow.My highlights so far have been: - Building a team of leads around me to ensure every engineer has a regular 1 to 1 meeting - Defining a competency matrix for engineers in Cubic to ensure they clearly understand their career path. - Increasing headcount by 25% in 2021 and continuing the same trend in 2022. - Focusing on how we get better by creating a series of OKRs that focus on engineering excellence. - Merging the test and engineering functions to create truly collaborative scrum teams that solve all their problems together including the challenge of automated test.There are many more challenges to overcome. If you'd like to help us do that check out our careers page. We're always looking to talk to excellent engineers.

Symantec’s Rulespace technology is responsible for providing both internal teams and external customers such as Akamai, Cisco and Citrix with a web content categorisation service. The team is made up of 5 software engineers in Dublin, 3 operations engineers (2 in Dublin 1 in Warsaw) and 2 technical support engineers (1 in the UK and 1 in Oregon).• The Rulespace product engineering and operations teams were moved to Dublin from Oregon in 2013. At the time no engineering staff were relocated, and I was tasked with hiring and building out the new teams while keeping the service up and running and ensuring that customers were supported. We achieved this with no down time for customers.• Engaged with all team members to understand needs and set expectations, adopted a coaching and supportive approach to mentor individuals, monitored performance and utilised feedback that successfully developed skills, ownership and motivation.• Oversaw a project to replace all keyword-based models with more accurate machine learning models using maximum entropy algorithms. This resulted in a 15% reduction in daily false positive rates.• Managed the implementation of a deep learning solution using Google’s TensorFlow to accurately detect pornographic images in blogging sites such as Tumblr. The initial release of the engine was 97% accurate and added 500-600 new sites daily.• Worked with the operations team to design and build a full disaster recovery instance of our backend rating services to allow us to keep adding URLs to our database in the case of a failure in Dublin. The BCDR instance was setup in AWS and allowed us to move all critical system over if necessary. This resulted in 100% uptime for customers.• Moved our internal front-end servers that customers rely to get their updates to AWS and implemented an IP geolocation solution using Route 53 that allowed customers to connect to the nearest updated server to them transparently.

As Senior Development Manager in the Shared Engineering Services group I was responsible for the architecture, design and planning of the localization automation infrastructure.• As the first certified scrum master in Dublin I Introduced Agile development methodologies to the Dublin and Warsaw teams.• Worked with global development teams to create an end to end localization system that allowed all Norton products in all 24 supported languages to be released simultaneously.

In this role I was responsible for managing the various development projects under taken by this team and for the team members themselves. The team of developers was split between the site in Dublin and a site in Warsaw which gave me good practical experience of managing teams across multiple sites. My role as the manager of this group meant I was responsible for the technical direction of the tools and systems as well as what developers would take on these particular challenges. I received certified Scrum master training during this time and try to use this with my teams as much as possible.

My time in this group has been spent working on an automated enterprise class localization system. This system is called DENT. DENT contains an SQL database at it’s backend, COM based communications with existing localization tools to populate and leverage from the database. An ASP.NET web based interface for engineers and reviewers and a web service based interface to the companies instance of Idiom’s worldserver.This system is used for all localization projects within Symantec, requiring it to be up 24/7 and support multiple users and projects. The DENT database, tools and infrastructure were designed by me. Development and maintenance is led by myself and 2 other developers using agile development methodologies and managed by an in house Scrum master.

The focus of this group was Localisation and Internationalisation automation. During this time I worked on re-writing many existing tools to aid the automation process. I re-designed and re-wrote two tools to use COM technology to allow for automation. Neon a new WYSIWYG HTML editor written in VB was spilt into a COM server and client. Also Duck a source file parsing tool written in C++ was spilt into a COM server and client. During this time I had 2 developers working for me and a QA person, this allowed me to gain experience running a team and handling scheduling and resourcing.I also worked with development teams within the US to identify better ways to develop Symantec software to make it easier and cheaper to localise. This involved working on the code of Symantec products such as NAV 2006 and NIS 2006.

As a senior software engineer in the International product engineering group in Dublin I was tasked with identifying International issues in Symantec software. The role involved:Carrying out code reviews on existing Symantec software to identify possible internationalisation issues.Developing tools to automate this process.Training development teams in the US how to write internationally aware software.

As a senior software engineer I continued my work with the existing tools set, but also developed some new tools. During this time Symantec moved much of it’s UI development to HTML. This presented a considerable challenge for localisation teams and I was tasked with developing a tool to identify translatable information within HTML and extracting it to an XMS file. During this time I also made changes to the existing resource library to allow for parsing of new windows resource types.

The tools group were responsible for developing software tools to aid in the translation of Symantec software. These tools were predominantly developed in C++ using Visual Studio. During this time I was responsible for:The maintenance of existing localisation tools written in C++, these included a resource editor, hardcoded string detector and localisation bug detector.Working with localisation engineers to fix problems and identify areas of improvement.Give training to localisation engineers on how to use the existing tools.Add new features to the existing tools set.

Responsible for the engineering of language version of Symantec products.