Mick Sear Email & Phone Number

Hemel Hempstead, Gb

London, England, United Kingdom

London, England, United Kingdom

This is the third contract with Avanti in the last 15 years. This time, Avanti needed someone familiar with the business domain and backend systems to design and build the next generation version of a suite of tools to manage satellite bandwidth capacity planning and reporting, while improving observability and maintainability of the legacy application. I championed a new data-centric approach within the business for which I designed and built a streaming solution and a data warehouse approach featuring DBT transformations. I also delivered new APIs written in Java 17, Kotlin and Spring Boot 3 with Gitlab CICD and deployment into AWS (EKS and EC2).

London, England, United Kingdom

Worked across three squads providing solution design, management and technical governance to various transformation projects going on since the Virgin – O2 merger. Additionally worked on an end state architecture for strategic migration away from a legacy middleware approach. Fastify NodeJS services deployed into GCP (GKE) using Gitlab pipelines

London, England, United Kingdom

Helped to guide the transition to cloud (Azure) for a significant part of the bank’s estate of applications. Worked on caching, secrets management, Terraform Enterprise configuration, Node-based POC of CosmosDB, Mongo Atlas and Managed Cassandra feature evaluation for teams to help with curation process. Supplied a new architecture for management group structures and policy-as-code to allow simpler security governance and management. Part of the remit in this role was to demonstrate and drive best practices for a cloud-native approach in an environment accustomed to ‘click-ops’ and maintaining legacy systems.

United Kingdom

This was a reboot of the B2B ecommerce project that was interrupted by Covid in 2020, acting as a technical lead across a team of around twenty developers spread out geographically across three continents. The role entailed a high level of mentoring and upskilling of in-house developers to improve testing rigor, standards observation, and general integration approaches. The product uses full infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) and has high redundancy and cross-region capabilities using technologies like Kong API gateway, Kubernetes, CockroachDB and several GCP cloud components like Cloud Tasks. Defined Terraform for environments and Concourse CICD. Arranged for DNS, TLS and Oauth configuration. Configured Kubernetes such as manifests for scaling, security, ingress etc. Oversaw the onboarding of customers to the new system globally with defect resolution and observability and monitoring improvements for ongoing SRE operations. Hands on with Kotlin application code throughout. The platform is expected to handle upwards of one billion dollars annually.

United Kingdom

A greenfield proof of concept project deployed into Azure with a Java and JS (React) codebase, delivering code into DeutscheBank. Delivered the Azure DevOps pipeline to provide complete automation and ensured that all services were delivered as a tested set. Set up Prometheus metrics, Grafana, dashboards from source control into Kubernetes and auth integration with AD. Contributed to the Terraform infra management and packaged apps as a Helm 3 chart.

Uxbridge

Working on data ingestion and transformation using a variety of technologies to streamline business processes and gain useful insights.

Hemel Hempstead, England, United Kingdom

Delivered a cloud-to-cloud migration of microservices from Azure to Kubernetes-on-GCP, and then followed that with a new B2B ecommerce platform using Kotlin and Vertx with Cockroach DB. Full DevOps own-what-you-write culture.

London, United Kingdom

Proof of concept work on secrets management using Hashicorp Vault and Service Mesh analysis to support the Vocalink NextGen project. Responsibilities involved scripting deployment of Vault into GKE and configuration of Vault to use a variety of backends for storing secrets, auto init and auto unseal of development instances, Kubernetes authentication and development of a Spring Boot app to demonstrate how to distribute credentials securely. Integration of Vault with CertManager. Service mesh analysis involved a formal evaluation of Istio, Linkerd2 and Consul Connect for provision of mutual TLS, traceability, and observability of traffic in the Kubernetes cluster

Uxbridge

Working on performance optimisation of data collection and analytics with AWS and Java stack.

Welwyn Garden City, England, United Kingdom

Role via Equal Experts. Developed microservices for strategic Clubcard propositions using VertX, Cassandra and Spark, with apps running in Kubernetes and AWS CloudFormation / OpsWorks database cluster. Implemented canary deployments, improved pipelines. Mentored other team members, boomeranged to other teams, pair-programmed. Demoed at weekly sessions and conducted tech talks. Worked on promoting high availability and high automation, and helped manage transition to blue-green deployments for Cassandra to avoid snowflaking. Scripted and documented reliable processes for upgrading production cluster without downtime, used by all till and online transactions at all Tesco stores. Developed AWS Cloudformation for Cassandra multi-DC cluster, with VPCs, security groups, routing tables, subnets, bootstrap scripts, monitoring, etc. and set up Splunk logging and Slack alerting. CICD development of Jenkins Groovy DSL pipeline scripts. Developed backup integrity checks for Cassandra, worked on data migrations, schema migrations, troubleshooting. Improved resiliency and overall system behavior by implementing Vertx retryable HTTP calls with exponential backoff and circuit breaker functionality.

Developed multiple microservices deployed in Kubernetes for NowTV CMS. Developed Gatling load tests and worked on productionising the system with non-functional testing, monitoring and alerting tools.

London

- Agile delivery of productionised code for a client project, including a complete code audit and overhaul. - Prepared for a security penetration test, refactoring code to validate and sanitise user input, removal of unintended application behaviour and introduction of safeguards. Tested using the OWASP ZAP tool. - Improved maintainability and legibility of code by re-writing the administration user interface using Angular.js

London

- Improved educational outcomes across Kenya and Tanzania by developing various applications for DFID and ESA funded projects including country-wide captive portal technology that integrates with traffic QoS hardware, handling thousands of concurrent client connections with an approach optimised for remote management. - Created application which has been developed into feature rich product capable of taking payments, producing usage reports, and which could be re-skinned for different partners. - Designed multi-language social Q&A forum aimed at enhancing teaching by providing content sharing opportunities with commenting, voting, tagging, and full text search capabilities. - Delivered multicast content management portal with content delivery scheduling and multithreading to synchronise remote school servers over high latency satellite links.

Hemel Hempstead, United Kingdom

Software development consultant, working on a variety of projects for different clients covering conception stage to delivery using a variety of software stacks. This role covers a number of contract roles in the same time period.

Rickmansworth

Returned to Succeed Consultancy as a software consultant part-time to assist in a big project. - Trained and mentored developers, providing key development aid to enhance development time and accuracy. - Supported the adaptation of the MetaCanvas framework to meet specific client needs, including those of McDonalds, Tesco, Pret, Nandos, and several insurance companies. - Designed custom API with Nashorn, built functionality, and integrated reporting services. - Delivered highly customizable row-level security with a permissions engine based on Spring Security and custom Spring expressions, allowing all endpoints and data to be protected. - Carried out penetration testing using OWASP ZAP.

Holborn

- Agile development of REST endpoints with Jersey for microservices including an LDAP user service, MS Word, and PDF Document export, and video transcoding in media processing workflow that fed into an advanced video content repository for news agencies. - Key contributor to development of queue infrastructure using Qpid for pipeline processing systems for rich media using scalable discrete processing nodes which were fed tasks by queue. - Debugged thread blocking issues in Qpid Java driver using IDE debugging tools and Visual VM to profile and create thread dumps and improve product functionality.

Rickmansworth

- Built software with emerging technologies like MongoDB and paradigms like SaaS, building new technology solutions based on client needs. - Led development of REST-based Java middleware project for US client, which handled 20,000 plus time clocking devices at scale. - Introduced Agile development processes including sprints, Kanban, stand-ups. - Designed, guided, and actively developed MetaCanvas data visualization and linking framework from proof of concept stage through to production, using single page application (SPA) design patterns and multi-tiered, loosely coupled server-side architecture backed by MongoDB and SQL. - Spearheaded work in integration of features such as multithreaded event and alerting engine, strong security features, and Single Page Application UI approach using innovative Javascript and well-structured REST API. - Implemented Oracle EDQ for insurance and legal firm clients to improve screening ability against sanctioned individual and country data. - Migrated Glasgow University system, discovering thread weaknesses while stress and performance testing Oracle software and guiding system architecture optimisations that wouldn’t have been observed until in production.

Developer for satellite data distribution system, allowing UDP messages to be broadcast and multicast across Europe using a carousel system. Data fed in using web services, and then scheduled to utilise available bandwidth, taking into account priority & size of data to be delivered using a carousel.

Hatfield

- Developed web front end to Covigo messaging platform for configuration of inbound SMS, MMS, email, and bulk outbound WAP Push, SMS, MMS, and email messages. - Integrated with CMS for rapid delivery of platform features.

London

- Wrote social and game engine API in Java, using XMLRPC for Flash/Flex front-end and Hibernate back end. - Delivered high performance and reliability by employing integration, soak, and stress tests using JMeter to identify issues.

Moodle development (PHP) and Java development (configuring system to auto-deploy student projects to Tomcat)

Slough

- Rapid application development for campaigns and core services such as O2 Bolt-ons, PUK code retrieval, online help, and WAP sites - Administered replicated MySQL servers and six web servers. - Created general framework code, ported individual applications to Java, and headed other Java projects. - Maintained and monitored systems in production environment and supported systems out of hours.

I worked at Epson UK from leaving university to 1998 when I moved to Canon, and then to a Canon dealer called Vision, after which I returned to Epson UK in 1999 and remained there until 2004. - Developed and maintained websites for UK, Ireland, and Scandinavia, including both design and coding of HTML, PHP, and Perl. - Delivered proof of concept interactive elements using Flash and Javascript. - Refactored legacy code to introduce new best practices like CSS and semantic HTML while supporting legacy browser. - Designed and developed sales intranet, providing platform for staff to share best practices and retail intelligence. - Trained internal and external groups, presented at interest groups and Royal Photographic Society as technical evangelist. - Rapidly progressed through technical support ranks to become technical conduit between UK and Japan head office for consumer products.

2-1, History

Education record

Education record