Sam Stephens Email & Phone Number

AWS architecture and software development. Focusing on data management, extraction and searchability.

New Zealand

Part of the Circuit board, with a particular focus on supporting Circuit in their technology decisions.

New Zealand

I provided AWS architecture, patterns and practices, and development consultancy to Ronin and their clients.

New Zealand

I provided AWS architecture, patterns and practices, and development consultancy to Koan and their clients.

Greater Seattle Area, Auckland, And London

I worked across a wide range of systems during my tenure with Mechanical Turk, and on many projects. We owned large scale distributed systems with complex business logic and workflow, and also a number of APIs and websites. I was valued enough that when I left Seattle at the end of 2015, I was able to take the job with me, and continue to work with the Seattle based team remotely from Auckland in 2016-2018, and from London in 2018-2020.Highlights: • One of two senior developers on a 20 person team, providing leadership, architecture and development for the launch of two new AWS products, Amazon Augmented AI and SageMaker Ground Truth. The serverless systems we built supported TPS in the thousands and 99.99% availability. • Was the leader and team SME for https://requester.mturk.com, a very complex Ruby on Rails website with over 20 tables, several entities with interrelated stateful workflows, an asynchronous jobs service, and integrations with around 10 different services. I delivered many projects, features and upgrades for this website. • Led and contributed to projects designing and building large scale distributed systems with complex business logic and workflow. • Led and contributed to projects designing and building complex front ends, both traditional Ruby On Rails, and using modern frontend technologies such as React/Redux, Web Components, and the Shadow DOM. • Driving operational excellence throughout my time with AWS. I was given an organisational award for my operational excellence. • Was an original AWS Security Guardian when the programme began, with responsibility for partnering with AWS Security to ensure the systems and features we delivered were secure and robust. • Mentoring and development of team members, including working with several developers to get them promoted. • Extensive involvement in development standards and methodology, code review and standards, and operational excellence, even when remote.

Sydney, Australia

ACARA is a federal organization, responsible for the national curriculum, national assessments and reporting on education across Australia’s states and territory.Highlights: • Architected and developed an ASP.NET MVC 3 based system for managing and rating test items, including associated workflow. The system involves heavy use of AJAX, Knockout JS and JSON endpoints to provide a system with the responsiveness required. I was heavily involved in requirements gathering and ran workshops with mock-ups and videos that resulted in a product that delighted users. • Built a test system to process input data files for the MySchool website and scrap the website to ensure that all the data provided was ingested and displayed correctly. These tests use HttpClient from the new WebAPI tools, and SGMLReader for HTML parsing. • Provision of recommendations to improve MySchool: project practices; data gathering and management; possible technological directions for the website; improvement in development practice; and low level fixes to the current codebase. • Driving the creation of development standards and practices, by facilitation of inclusive meetings, setting of agendas and provision of baseline recommendations for the entire team to build upon and work with.

Wellington, Wellington Region, New Zealand

Kiwibank is a state owned bank, launched in 2002. Having first come on board as a contractor, I was invited to join their team on a permanent basis. I was second in charge of the team, and acting team lead as necessary.Highlights: • Worked on projects adding features to the Internet Banking website, which was built using ASP.NET. • Co-developed the beta of the Android Internet Banking application. • Heavily involved in mentoring and guidance of team members. • Driver of code quality, championing high quality unit testing, and contributing to our QA standards and guidelines. • Driver of operational excellence, including presenting a document to business owners that drove future work on monitoring, logging, and incident diagnosis.

Core Technology is a medium-small applications development company in Wellington Central, with around 50 staff.I was a member of the development team. Core develops applications for clients, and also provides contract developers to organisations. I was in both roles whilst at Core. Core sells a proprietary software platform, Aviarc. A number of the projects I was involved in at Core were written using Aviarc.Responsibilities• Self-managing, responsible for time and workload management.• Requirements gathering.• Providing feedback on the Aviarc development platform, and discussions on the platform direction. Feeding enhancements from projects built in Aviarc back into the platform.• Client relations. I was responsible as Core’s point of contact at Kiwibank, and responsible for managing Core’s team there. This team was four people at its largest. • I also was responsible for providing maintenance, support and billing for a major energy company.• Providing mentoring and guidance for team members.• Involvement in interviews and hiring decisions.

Contracted by Core.Involvement in website redevelopment for a major energy company. The J2EE website used Interwoven as a CMS. I authored JSP pages, J2EE code, and worked on the Interwoven CMS setup and Perl code. I became a Perl expert for the purposes of this project, including the code to take Interwoven metadata and produce a menu hierarchy XML file to be consumed by the J2EE code. For a follow up project I implemented Interwoven publishing workflows including approvals, notifications and delayed publishing.