Stephen Houston Email & Phone Number

Belfast, United Kingdom

• Director and CTO.• Identify and realise market opportunities.• Design and implementation of Rails based full stack apps.• Management of the entire software development lifecycle in a fast moving, dynamic start-up.

Belfast, United Kingdom

• Software development consultancy.• Creating products on Distributed Ledger, and Blockchain technologies, such as R3 Corda.• Architecture of large scale products consisting of legacy components and new micro-services.• Business transformation consultancy, including proof of concept and technology reviews.• Implementation of REST API, services and web applications using Spring and Java 8.• Agile development consultancy and mentoring.• Training on software development best practices.• Product management and marketing.• Working with large financial services organisations.

Zurich, Switzerland

• Managing a delivery department of around 75 people.• Handling offshore, nearshore and local teams.• Ensuring the successful delivery of B3i’s portfolio of products.• Responsible for the technical decisions.• Promoting B3i’s technology with partners.• Managing vendor relationships.• Helped drive down the costs of developing on blockchain, and for hosting those products.

Zurich, Switzerland

Zurich, Switzerland

• Responsible for ensuring that B3i used the most appropriate blockchain technology.• Ensuring that the development teams can work with our chosen technology.• Wrote many key components of B3i’s software portfolio.• Assisted the Chief Architect in defining the architecture for B3i’s products and innovative Fluidity architecture that provides a solid base for transformational change in the Insurance Industry.

Belfast, United Kingdom

• Involved in early stage opportunities, building trust and confidence with clients.• Helping clients understand their needs and how their business can grow with Intel products.• Definition of client specific solution architectures that encompass Intel and non-Intel products.• Defining marketing messages for the product suite.• Preparing and delivering product messaging for the field.• Helping to broaden the reach of the product suite by utilizing it in new markets including Retail, Healthcare and Industrial.• Designing and delivering projects to showcase product capabilities and the value it brings to Intel and its partners.• Analysis of the competitive market place, identification of gaps, opportunities, trends and evolution.• Definition of product requirements, and relevant business justification.• Working across the organisation to define a combined hardware and software architecture to support Intel’s activities in Enterprise and Internet of Things.• Investigating and selecting new products and technologies and utilizing where appropriate.• Security Champion for the Product Suite.• Participated in outreach activities such as Women Who Code, Cyber safety for children, Intel Galileo based hackathon and speaking at Mobile World Congress.• Continuation of all Technical Product Manager and Architect responsibilities from Aepona.

Belfast

• Responsible for setting the product direction for the Partner Management Engine (PME).• Architect for the Partner Management Engine, with overall technical responsibility.• Consultant on API design for internal and external projects, promoting the use of RESTful APIs.• Handled complex customer engagements, both on-site and remotely.• Organisation of customer workshops to get round difficult roadblocks and facilitate progress.• Continuation of all responsibilities from Principal Software Engineer role.

Belfast, United Kingdom

• Analysed trends in market place, predicted future direction and decided on appropriate path to take.• Produced requirements for R&D roadmap features of the product suite.• Prepared material for consumption by sales and marketing to further their product knowledge and drive product sales.• Prepared and presented material to customers outlining direction of products, features and how they could be utilised those to further their business.• Led several teams of developers in local and off-shore locations.• Developed a high throughput, low latency proxy to front services, which extended their capabilities through provisioning, authentication and authorisation, policy rules, logging, reporting, monitoring and load-balancing.• Developed a service registry for definition, cataloging and exposure of services. Integrated with the proxy for real-time, bi-directional updates of services and system status.• Developed customer extensible portals for administering the product suite and encouraging developer sign up, participation and community building.• Developed a customer extensible service layer to abstract, co-ordinate and consolidate multiple data models and sources, with their associated rules. The layer provides data consistency, security, auditing, and forms the basis for third parties to integrate the platform into their own UIs and processes.• Integrated and customised JBoss and Liferay portal servers and Apache Tomcat.• Gathered requirements for, designed and implemented Business Processes using JBoss BPM.• Liaised with customers to solicit requirements that were captured with user stories. Designed and proposed solutions to their needs. Estimated and planned delivery of functionality.

Belfast, United Kingdom

• Architect for an enterprise level insurance application.• Identified and scoped refactoring opportunities.• Worked with analysts on gathering and reviewing requirements.• Estimated project effort and managed project planning.• Led and successfully delivered several high profile projects.• Improved the skills of others through mentoring and code reviews.

Belfast, United Kingdom

• Developed frameworks to simplify development of complex business rules.• Developed coding and testing standards to improve quality.• Worked on the design of a J2EE application to replace existing legacy systems.• Held company information sessions to further new technology adoption.

Belfast, United Kingdom

• Directly mentored other developers and new hires.• Suggested and developed an analytical tool for monitoring our primary application’s performance using Hibernate, AspectJ and Struts 2.

Belfast, United Kingdom

• Team’s WebSphere and J2EE standards expert.• Responsible for development of a Struts based layer for a new application.

Belfast, United Kingdom

• Part of a large development team working on an MFC C++ based application.• Optimised Sybase database and stored procedures cutting query times from minutes to seconds.• Detected, analysed and fixed memory leaks in the product and its underlying framework.• Re-implemented core components of the product framework to be more reliable and easier to work with.• Trained new developers on the product, its fit in the larger portfolio, and the business cases behind it.