I am the Lead Technical Architect at Advanced Electronics Ltd, a leading manufacturer of fire alarm control panel equipment in the fire industry. I have been with the organization for over 11 years, recently transitioning from my previous role as Technical Architect to my current position.In my role, I am responsible for designing and building scalable and adaptive architectures for our cloud-delivered products and services. This involves working closely with business leadership to align our digital solutions strategy with actionable goals, and then collaborating with the delivery team to implement and support these solutions.A significant achievement in my career is the development and delivery of AdvancedLive, a cloud-based fire system monitoring and control system. This real-time IoT platform provides fire system users with an intuitive interface to monitor their systems and ensure compliance with regulations.I employ a variety of skills and tools in my role, including architecture design, technology selection, and platform evaluation. A typical week involves strategic discussions with business leaders, planning and supporting the delivery team, and conducting workshops and event storming sessions to derive solutions to complex problems.One of the main challenges I face is leading the digital transformation within a traditional manufacturing organization. To address this, I have introduced Agile practices, automated testing, CI/CD processes, and cloud-based infrastructure through Azure. This has enabled the organization to quickly adapt and deliver innovative cloud-based products and services.What I enjoy most about my job is problem-solving. I am passionate about understanding user problems and delivering solutions that exceed their expectations. By leveraging my 25 years of experience and the expertise of my team, we consistently deliver ground-breaking solutions that delight our users.

• Subject matter expert on designing, building and delivering scalable products and services• Development team manager, responsible for recruiting, mentoring and retention of team members from new graduate level through• Advising the business management team and stakeholders to develop the "digital strategy" around our cloud enabled products and services• Working alongside Product Manager and Insights to hone in on user problems, rapidly build prototypes to test concepts, to deliver true user centric solutions• Implementing software development best practise and architecture to empower product team to deliver scalable, flexible and secure by design cloud based solutions• Utilising cutting edge automated testing, deployment, CI/CD and monitoring solutions to ensure maximum product development resource is focussed on delivering value to users• Identifying PaaS and SaaS partners for delivery of cross functional concerns, so that product team can focus on development and delivery of core business solutions

My role with Unique Magazines started as the lead system architect and systems developer on the software platform which runs the company websites and the back office order processing and distribution systems.My role has developed as the business has grown rapidly over the last 2-3 years. I now head up the marketing and digital initiatives within the company, which covers aspects such as Email Marketing, PPC, affiliate marketing, social networking, SEO and converstion rate optimisation.

After working in many organisations over the years, I was presented with a fabulous opportunity to work as a self employed contractor.My first contracting position was with Proctor and Gamble at their Technical Centre in Newcastle Upon Tyne. The role was to work with their Work Process Improvement team, writing applications to automate processes. Each project was rated based on potential time saving per iteration, and annual time saving. i.e. some tasks may save 1 minute per task iteration, but if that task is completed dozens of times a week, the savings mount up. The applications I created in this time were calculated to have saved P&G 7000 hours per year.I also worked with clients to advise on their software projects, help them draw up business requirements, write the technical specification and then deliver the solution.I worked on projects ranging from E-Commerce Websites, corporate websites, digital marketing campaigns and producing tools to automate repetitive manual tasks to save time and money.

At Amazing Learning I was responsible for the design and architecture of the projects and products.During my time with Amazing I built a complete application framework with the aim of reducing development time scales by using code generation techniques and applying standard patterns and practices. The framework I ultimately put in place operated in a similar manner to the likes of Microsoft Entity Framework or nHibernate, in a Database First strategy. It allowed a developer to select a DB table, and it would then generate an Entity model, Repository Implementation and Unit or Work code as well as basic CRUD methods and a scaffold UI. This saved us an incredible number of hours, allowing developers to focus on application features rather than plumbing and implementation details. This in turn allowed us to deliver a huge project for One North East in only a matter of months, and hit a critical funding deadline.The framework became the basis for all product development, allowing all of the formerly disparate applications to communicate with each other.

Creating Careers contracted me to work with their excellent development team to help migrate their existing e-learning platform from ASP VBScript to the Microsoft .NET technology. The development team didn't have a great deal of exposure to .NET, so my job was to lead the way with best practise and patterns.

At mancala I was responsible for the design and architecture of the companies main product offering. In my time with mancala we developed a complete website management product, which then spawned a lite version of the product which has gone from strength to strength.

After my work in Property Online, I moved into Leighton Limited (the parent organisation of Property Online).I worked primarily within Leighton Media on digital marketing and website development projects. It was whilst working with Leighton Media that I developed an email marketing tool as part of my final University Project.This email marketing tool became the Communicator product marketed by Leighton. Communicator has since been developed into an enterprise class digital marketing product.

Property Online was my launch pad into the Web Development industry, and I loved every minute of it.I started at Property Online as part of my University Course, and I must have done something right as they asked me to stay on and complete my course whilst working with them.Property Online built and managed a property search portal, which brought together properties from many different sources into 1 large database. The search portal itself was then white labelled and was implemented by Freeserve, World Online, Bradford and Bingley... the list goes on.My major acheivement here was building a content management system aimed at estate agents who did not currently have a web presence. The idea was they could use the CMS application to build a website, and list all of their properties for sale. The properties would then feed into the main property search portal database.