Peter Smith Email & Phone Number

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Global

London, England, United Kingdom

Technical lead for the Attribute Reputation team looking after the journeys used to capture bank account details (BARS) and search for addresses (ALF). Worked closely with other teams within HMRC to deliver new services to support the governments COVID schemes, in many cases helping with development outside of our usual team boundaries. Urgently improved the performance of both the BARS and the ALF services in response to the COVID pandemic. Although traffic to these services increased by an order of magnitude due to being involved in COVID support schemes, there was little to no user impact. Migrated our address-lookup data store from Elasticsearch to Amazon Aurora, replacing a costly cluster with a serverless database implementation which was a better fit for the shape of the data and usage patterns. Costs for this component were reduced by 75%. Architected and built a series of new APIs for providing insights about bank accounts and national insurance numbers. A number of data sources were combined to give each attribute a ‘risk score’ from 0 to 100 indicating the likelihood of fraud. Implemented a groundbreaking pilot for cross-government data sharing allowing the Department for Education (DfE) to utilise our insights APIs. DfE was able to uncover and prevent fraudulent activity immediately after engaging with the scheme.

Reading, England, United Kingdom

Established the new workforce management team, focusing on lean agile, design thinking and operability principals. The team was tasked with improving the end to end ‘leakage’ journey from detection, scheduling, planning, repair and reinstatement. After a 4-week discovery phase, an MVP was delivered in 12 weeks to support leak detection technicians in the field. The resulting Android app and backend web interface replaced a manual system that had an average lead time of 48 hours with a near real-time process. Developed a single sign-on solution used by multiple teams to provide seamless UX for users in the field, reducing the training burden and time to onboard significantly. Worked with another supplier to deliver an integration with SAP faced with multiple constraints and limited flexibility. The integration was delivered successfully one day ahead of schedule and allowed Thames to get leak jobs in front of the planning team on the same day that they were raised. Technologies used: C#, ASP.Net Core 3, MVC, XUnit, Moq, JavaScript, React JS, Jest, Enzyme, Android, Kotlin, Robolectric, Appium, Microsoft Azure, Azure Devops, CosmosDb, Azure Storage, Event Grid, Active Directory

London, England, United Kingdom

Responsible for the architecture of the Tax Platform as a whole and coordinating the efforts of 6 platform teams in order to realise a common roadmap. Worked within the ‘cross-ops’ group leading the Tax Platform, collaborating with individuals from the client as well as other suppliers, providing advice and support for new and existing streams of work. Re-architected build and release processes as part of a major overhaul of the build system used by all 60+ teams, allowing teams to practice continuous deployment for the first time in the platform’s history. The ability of the new system to scale according to demand reduced wait times significantly. Built an MVP of a new platform using Kubernetes to run key internal facing microservices. This enabled us to remove a significant amount of legacy tooling, improved security, and allowed the client to make an informed choice about the future of the wider platform. Alongside the infrastructure architect, designed the new generation of HMRC’s Tax Platform on ECS. A zero-downtime strategy for migrating services allowed the platform teams to control the migration and avoid huge diseconomies of scale due to the size of the estate.

London, England, United Kingdom

Member of the team responsible for ensuring that all teams using HMRC’s internal PaaS can operate their services effectively, including but not limited to: building, deploying & monitoring of services. Communicating with 60+ teams over 5 physical sites, listening to their needs and providing 2nd line support.Developed internal tools and processes to streamline the delivery of services on the HMRC platform, including a restructure of the continuous integration pipeline which reduced manual error and build times. Worked on several large-scale software upgrades to allow teams to leverage new features and security fixes which allowed HMRC to continue delivering without any loss of service or efficiency. Rescued an important project that was in danger of failure by consulting with the team responsible and aiding them on best practices. This avoided a public crisis and maintained the integrity of the organization. Technologies used: Scala, Play, SBT, Jenkins, Travis, Nginx, Docker, Bintray, Nexus, MongoDb

London, England, United Kingdom

Lead the team dedicated to building the systems that HMRC uses to identify fraud and suspicious behavior.Worked to replace an ageing and costly legacy application with a microservice based solution using an iterative, agile approach, allowing HMRC to identify significantly more fraud at a fraction of the cost. Helped design big data architecture for analyzing audit events, capable of ingesting up to 250gb of data per day. Models built from this data continue to shape the future of fraud detection in HMRC. Liaised with 30+ teams to ensure that traffic created by the auditing process stayed at manageable levels during the biggest business event of the year, the self-assessment peak. Technologies used: Scala, Play, SBT, Scalatest, RabbitMq, Kafka, Spark, Splunk, Angular JS, MongoDb, Jenkins, Docker

London

First technical consultant on the ground building relationships with existing teams and performing a review of current practices and processes on behalf of the consultancy. Integrated with the 'Metis' team maintaining an application comprised of a web front end, API, proprietary message queue and a microservices architecture. Built a proof of concept HTML5 UI for a new application 'Thor' using material design techniques Advised the team on how to streamline their development and build processes, introducing git flow and a new branching strategy saving many developer hours each week. Technologies used: C#, Javascript, Angular JS, Polymer JS, Webcomponents, Bower, Psake, Grunt, Node.JS, ASP.Net, MVC, Web API, Entity Framework, Nhibernate, TeamCity, Octopus Deploy

Henley-On-Thames, England, United Kingdom

Provided consultancy and expertise to the team building the next generation of the Softools platform to replace an existing legacy system; aided with the migration of clients and data. Designed and built a low-bandwidth, single page Javascript application with CQRS backend. Made significant cost savings by introducing scaling metrics to inform capacity planning. Introduced the team to agile methodologies and continuous integration allowing for daily releases. Technologies used: Windows Azure, SQL Azure, Azure Service Bus, C#, Javascript, Asp.Net, MVC, Web API, Entity Framework, MongoDb, Knockout.Js, jQuery, HTML 5, Rabbit MQ, Lucene, TeamCity

Chalgrove, Oxen

Developed a web application to manage the background checking process for a major credit agency. Promoted use of design patterns, unit testing and coding standards, as well as mentoring, performing code reviews and introducing continuous integration processes to speed up deployments. Automated a manual integration with a third party system, removing the need for a costly manual process. Technologies used: Windows Azure, ASP.NET, MVC, Razor, Entity Framework, jQuery, Knockout.Js

Worked on the flagship 'Accelerate' project, aiming to provide a single point of access to all their services. Mentored developers, established best practices, encouraged correct use of design patterns & unit testing through demonstrations and presentations as well as code reviews and leading stand-up meetings. Lead a re-design of the supplier questionnaire engine, the goal being to provide high performance for global customers. This work significantly raised the profile of the company with several clients. Technologies used: C#, ASP.NET, MVC, SQL Server, Linq-to-SQL, jQuery, TeamCity, CDN, T4 Templates

Reading

Responsible for a team of 7 developers, overseeing their work on implementation projects. Managed the Abritas 'small project' business unit dealing with minor changes to existing implementations. Developed web applications for local councils and provided 1st line support via phone and email.

Reading, United Kingdom