Russell Gray Email & Phone Number

Remote / London

London, United Kingdom

Rolled-out statsd/graphite monitoring across much of the server infrastructure, improving insight into how the transfer software and storage systems are performing.Introduced version-aware reference counting to uploaded files, to allow faster and more accurate identification of files that are candidates for deletion. Wrote a multithreaded deletion tool with adaptive clustering (the size of the cluster grows and shrinks around peak times so that it can run more aggressively during quiet periods) that safely reclaims storage at a rate of around 35 terabytes a day.Prototyped a sharding strategy for a large (9B rows) table that has two unique lookup keys.Designed and implemented improved differential upload functionality based on both a strong hash and a rolling CRC, an algorithm inspired by rsync.Introduced and oversaw an improved agile development process.

London, United Kingdom

Responsible for all customer-related systems during a 3-year technical investment programme. Designed new account service to be the single source of truth for customer data across multiple jurisdictions and abiding by the requirements of multiple regulatory bodies. Implemented a low-level DNS library (relying on PTR and TXT records, which are not supported by System.Net.Dns) to allow .Net applications to query Betfair’s in-house service discovery system.Modified Coco/R’s C# 3.5 grammar file to produce a customised parser/lexer tailored specifically to help with a large-scale internal refactoring effort. Used them to write tools that generated ‘happy path’ integration test stubs for a legacy codebase.Line-managed a team of 6 developers and delivered a rewrite of Betfair’s market management application (WinForms/C# client, Java service). This project dramatically decreased the time elapsed when turning markets in-play, resulting in a revenue uplift of over £1M/year in addition to reduced training costs and reduced operator error.Implemented and maintained an open-source Python wrapper for the public API, which was adopted by a number of Betfair key accounts.Won the inaugural Betfair Engineering Innovation Award for developing a RESTful wrapper around the SOAP public API.

London, United Kingdom

Designed and implemented Pocket Arrest, a multithreaded mobile information management application written in C#, featuring asynchronous socket-based network communication and an on-board SQL Server CE database. Developed message protocol library shared by server and mobile application, supporting creation of text/binary hybrid messages specifically designed to minimise bandwidth and recover from failure, since communication was typically restricted to GPRS.

Crewe, United Kingdom

Diagnosed and fixed bugs in a proprietary traffic-shaping network driver (C++). Implemented scheduling for a web-based provisioning and billing system (classic ASP, C++).