Michael Ridgway Email & Phone Number

Richmond, Victoria, Au

As Chief Engineer my goal is to uplift the technical capabilities of our entire 200+ engineers thus improving our productivity and delivering more product value to our customers. I've achieved this through a number of key initiatives including: a clear technical vision, aligning all teams on engineering outcomes, reducing variance in our environment, and making measurement visible to all.

Richmond, Victoria, Au

Strategy is nothing without execution and Michael has consistently driven both a compelling architectural vision and the tools and processes to help teams deliver it. This mission to scale people and technology is at the heart of everything Michael does. Always pushing to raise standards, pick up the pace, and aim high - Michael always brings out the best in people so that they can obtain new heights and achieve greatness.People► Company wide engineering strategy and execution► Comfortable working with Exec all the way to pairing and coding with individual engineers► Line and performance management experience► Directly responsible for 100+ engineersPatterns► Serverless (where practical/possible)► Backend for Frontends (BFFs)► Reusable business logic backend services► Publishing and consuming data asynchronously via a GDPR compliant Kafka► Event Sourcing, Projectors, Reactors► Public & Private API development using OpenAPI► AppSec including security vulnerability prevention and patchingTechnologies► GO, Kotlin, Ruby, React and Typescript► AWS Lambda/Fargate, RDS PostgreSQL/DynamoDB► Open Policy Agent for Authorization► Kafka (both current state & event sourced data), Vault► Sentry, DataDog, SLOs, Blameless, Backstage.io plus many others...

Richmond, Victoria, Au

Our two Ruby monoliths (Performance & Engagement products) were struggling to scale as Culture Amp continued to rapidly grow. Michael drove the strategy of providing a platform of common services so that our 20+ engineering teams could work independently of each other. This saw our teams deliver faster and with higher quality as more and more features began to be built outside the monoliths.Cutting up monoliths is a slow and difficult process, but by having a clear Technical Vision and a path to success, Michael was able to guide teams towards a fully distributed architecture. Teams can now build front-end and back-end services outside the monoliths and share their data asynchronously via Kafka. The visible biggest achievement of this work was the combining of our Performance and Engagement products into a single unified homepage and navigation.Achievements:► Unified the customer experience► Delivered 10+ Frontends using the BFF pattern► Delivered 15+ Backends exposing internal APIs► Brought Kafka and asynchronous data sharing into the development process► Deployed Vault to provide GDPR compliant data topics► Directly responsible for 75+ engineers

Richmond, Victoria, Au

Culture Amp has one of the best Employee Engagement products available today. However, looking ahead we saw many gaps in the HR product sphere and Michael led a team to explore which of those gaps Culture Amp should (or should not) expand into.To do this, Michael established an internal R&D incubator within Culture Amp to rapidly test and incubate new growth opportunities to expand on our employee feedback platform.Achievements:► 3 teams pitched 70+ ideas► 4 idea validated via 30+ customer interviews► 3 partnerships created► Launched https://answers.peoplegeeks.com/Learnings during this time were:► Creating a start-up culture within an organisation is hard► Google 5 day sprints are intense, but they get you there quickly!► Metered funding is a good way to manage the time allocated to an idea► GTM and Sales need to be part of the solution from day 1The biggest outcome was not only the ability to rapidly test and validate new ideas with our customers, but that we needed to shoot for something bigger, which led us to acquire another company to leap us into the HR Performance space.

Richmond, Victoria, Au

Culture Amp is a great service to understand employee feedback, however its reporting was limited to a single survey - a snapshot in time. Michael researched and prototyped many algorithms capable of reporting and exploring all our survey data in a single view. This allows anyone to compare engagement scores for different countries, industries, company sizes and many more. This shows the power of our data and takes our people analytics to a whole new level.To make this possible, Michael drove the inception of Culture Amp’s Data Lake so that we had a consistent way for data to be shared securely with our teams, providing full GDPR support as well as a complete audit capability. This endeavor provided a reliable and robust set of production data to be used by our Product Analytics, Data Scientists and Machine Learning engineers to power the next generation of insights for customers.

Richmond, Victoria, Au

How can our customers read and classify 10,000+ free text survey comments accurately and quickly? This was the problem facing Culture Amp. Michael took it upon himself to hire and ramp up a team to work on Machine Learning and Text Analytics to solve this problem. Bringing in the Python programming language and numerous open-source libraries and our own special sauce, our Data Scientists and Machine Learning engineers we are now able to understand sentiment and classification of comments. Our customers can see what their employees are thinking and saying in a matter of minutes.For a more in depth review take a look at blog post below.

Seattle, Wa, Us

Michael was a founding member of the AWS Dev Warriors program in Australia. This exclusive community of invite only exceptional AWS customers had to prove they were passionate about technology and demonstrate a deep expertise in the AWS platform. Dev Warriors have direct access to Principal Solution Architects, Product Managers and AWS thought leaders focusing on tools, processes, practices and issues that affect developers and developing applications on AWS. The AWS Dev Warriors programme brings these people together to gain and share experiences on the cutting edge of cloud development.

Melbourne, Au

Many car sellers often got the year, badge or series incorrect when placing their car for sales on Carsales. This often caused confusion for buyers and resulted in difficulties with pricing. To help correctly identify the exact car being sold on Carsales, Michael and the AI team took advantage of the extensive library of car images. Our first AI “cyclops” recognizes the correct car from any angle car photo with an accuracy of over 97%. This has allowed Carsales to improve the buying experience by having more accurate pricing, prompting car sellers of missing photo angles during the creation process, plus helped car buyers compare cars with the same image angle presented side-by-side. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are integral parts of the technology landscape at Carsales. Michael built up the team and is now participating in cutting edge research in these areas resulting in many new services for our customers.

Melbourne, Au

Ryvuss Search was born out of a need to provide Carsales customers with a compelling search experience. Each used car is unique, and allowing customers to find their ideal car without filling our tedious search forms and scrolling through pages and pages of results, but instead allowing guided faceted search to continuously refine the search was revolutionary. Helping “buyers” connect more easily and effectively with “sellers” had a significant impact on the commercial success of Carsales and led to vastly increasing its market share. Michael took it upon himself to build the first prototype and pitch the idea internally. Within 10 months, Ryvuss Search was rolled out on carpoint.com.au and 6 months later, replaced the entire search platform within Carsales, powering the Carsales desktop site, mobile site and the Carsales iOS and Android Apps. With 2 patents pending and an awesome team of dedicated, committed and super smart individuals, Ryvuss now powers websites in South Korea, Mexico, Chile, Brazil and many other sites in Australia (including PetRescue.com.au).Michael has since been leading the commercialisation of Ryvuss and speaking about it in public forums such as the CTO Summit in Melbourne in December 2014 - https://ti.to/startup-cto-summit/melbourne and winning Ajay Bhatia the itNews CIO of the Year (Retail).

Melbourne, Au

Speaking at many public and private venues around Melbourne.* AWS Dev Day Melbourne - Panellist, Aug 2018* AWS Dev Warriors Melb - Delivering Machine Learning, May 2018* Voice of the customer - AWS APAC Solution Architecture training, Mar 2018* Voice of the customer - AWS APAC Solution Architecture training, Oct 2017* Monash - Micro-services culture (IBL Lecture), Sept 2017* Crossing the AI chasm - AWS Emerging Technologies, Brisbane & Melbourne Sept 2017* Monash - International Students (GPP) Program, August 2017* Top 10 cloud lessons - Melbourne Cloud Computing Meetup, July 2017* Voice of the customer - AWS APAC Solution Architecture training, June 2017* Ryvuss Deep Dive - AWS Dev Warriors, June 2017* DevQAOps - IBL Monash, May 2017* How Tech Companies Think - NetApp, June 2016* Team Culture - Computershare, April 2016* Delivery Engineering - CRS Development Conference, Feb 2016* Ops is hard - Melbourne AWS Aus Meetup, Sept 2015* Build vs Buy - CTO Summit, Dec 2015

Melbourne, Au

As the Core Services Manager, Michael led and managed the Core Services Team, whose primary purpose was to develop and support the infrastructure used by other retail development teams within Carsales. Responsible for all consumer-facing architecture and software design, Michael worked closely with retail teams to ensure adherence to strict development practices and enforce technical governance.A significant project Michael undertook during this time was the migration of the in-house image server to the Cloud. Implementing a solution using Microsoft Azure and Akamai, Carsales was able to auto-scale and increase capacity as needed, whilst serving millions of images to customers each day.

Melbourne, Au

As the Mobile Product and Development Manager, Michael took ownership over the newly-formed Mobile development team at Carsales. Under his leadership and direction, the team delivered 15 mobile sites and 3 iPhone Apps to complement the existing Carsales desktop web sites, as well as grew mobile traffic to surpass desktop traffic by 30% in 2 years, achieving a 4+ star-rated App in the App Store from 2010 through to 2011.

Melbourne, Au

Responsible for the delivery, quality and operations of all consumer-facing websites for the Cars, Trucks, Bikes, Boats and Industry verticals within Carsales. Managing a diverse team of over 30 developers, project managers and quality assurance engineers working on numerous projects simultaneously, Michael oversaw the delivery all business feature requests. During this time, Carsales website traffic grew by 300%+ while hardware costs only increased by 150% due to performance tuning and coding optimizations implemented.

Melbourne, Au

Involved in the amalgamation of the Carsales and the ACP (Australian Consolidated Press) online systems into a single retail platform, capable of scaling to the demands of carsales.com.au Migrated the existing single-tier architecture into a two-tier architecture (Web & Data) and integrated the Endeca search platform with Carsales systems to provide quick faceted searching.

Sydney, New South Wales, Au

Involved in the migration of carpoint.com.au, bikepoint.com.au and boatpoint.com.au from ASP to ASP.NET. Developed the C#.NET platform which delivered a Content Management System to enable content to be published daily as well as allow for hourly updates of stock.Delivered PrivateAdPoint.com.au which allowed self-service advert creation and became a million dollar revenue generator within 12 months of being deployed.

Schaumburg, Il, Us

Developed "netDeploy", a suite of tools that allows packaging and automatic deployment of software to client machines, as well as tracks usage and license compliance to enable enterprises to manage software effectively and efficiently. Also responsible for the team that built and delivered the license compliance components, which included the license manager (C++) and license reporting (C# ASP.NET) modules.

Worked on building the IDE for OpenUI - a cross platform UI framework. Gained extensive C++, OO and Win32 SDK experience.