Principal Engineer and first hire at this start-up using AI models to identify mental illness and its underlying symptoms. The models analyse thousands of biomarkers across speech, video and behaviour, gathered via neuropsychology-based online assessments.Recruited then led the software engineering team to design and build the platform which executed our vision. The core of this was a combination of Python microservices and an event-based architecture, with several React apps for patients & clinicians. The apps contained complex logic to capture patient audio/video and behaviour during interactive assessments. Our AI models were also exposed directly to customers via a REST API.We were hosted on AWS, using many services (e.g. Lambda, S3, SQS, RDS, DynamoDB, Sagemaker) but always preferring a Serverless approach where possible. Our flagship Next.js app made heavy use of React server components and was deployed to Vercel.Defined the development processes that allowed us to rapidly iterate and release, while retaining quality and availability for our initial customers. Worked closely with the Research team to integrate their AI models into the engineering platform and enable frequent production updates via MLOps.

Technical Lead of a product delivery team at this fast-growing start-up which doubled in size during my time there. A comprehensive remote healthcare platform, the product allows patients to remain at home while receiving intensive-care level monitoring. This is achieved with a combination of an FDA-cleared biosensor and a software platform that continuously monitors patients’ vital signs, triggers alarms and offers clinical dashboards to healthcare professionals.My team was responsible for delivering new features and improvements for both patients and clinicians - working across a suite of microservices (typically Java, Python & Postgres), as well as Angular web & mobile apps and many AWS services.This role required owning technical designs and deadlines as well as setting direction for the team. Crucially, while iterating rapidly and releasing to production multiple times per week, quality had to remain high and patient safety was our number one concern. However I also remained hands-on, coding & reviewing every day. Other responsibilities included mentoring, recruitment, handling customer issues and taking my share of supporting critical production systems 24/7.

Principal Product Developer on the BMC Discovery team - this product scans customers’ networks and provides detailed information about the hardware, software and dependencies it finds. Customers are typically medium to large enterprises with up to 100,000 physical & virtual servers to be discovered, as well as infrastructure & services in the Cloud.BMC Discovery is a complex, distributed, multi-process, multi-threaded application with a rich web-based UI and a proprietary graph database - offering many interesting technical challenges. I mainly worked with the large Python codebase on Linux, also writing C++ and JavaScript. Later helped introduce Docker, Kubernetes and AWS into our stack.Promoted several times while on the team. As well as my direct development responsibilities I helped set technical direction, improved processes, reviewed designs & code, trained colleagues, supported customers directly and spent much time on recruitment. Highlights: • Designed & implemented horizontal scaling of our proprietary C++ graph database. The resulting highly available and eventually consistent solution allowed our largest customers to store TBs of data & billions of graph nodes. • Created our product’s first external REST API for customers to automate managing their service. • Led a team building an Ops stack to manage our product’s new SaaS version. Enabled deployment & monitoring of our software and the many AWS services and Kubernetes clusters we used across regions & availability zones.

Senior Engineer in the Core Risk Engine team - a cross asset-class framework for building distributed risk & pricing applications, used by many IT teams within the bank. Developed in C++ and worked closely with our internal users to understand requirements. Led a team enhancing our framework to support the bank's next-generation analytics engine.Was then asked to lead the Derivatives Counterparty Risk Engine team. A major re-architecture was far behind schedule and my job was to assess the project’s current state, improve development processes, address all outstanding functional & stability issues and deliver the new system within a fixed timeframe of 5 months.The project I encountered used a wide variety of technologies and interacted with many systems. This was an immensely challenging role that tested both my technical and leadership skills. We did achieve our deadline, taking the new system live to praise from many levels of IT and the business. High points:• Introduced Agile practices - daily stand-ups, sprints, automated testing & deployment and continuous integration.• Addressed low developer morale caused by out-of-hours support burden. Ensured we investigated the root cause of every issue & improved our relationship with the 1st line support team - resulting in call-outs becoming rare.

Senior Engineer in the Exotic Interest Rate Derivatives team - my role was to enhance and support a trade pricing & risk management system relied on across 35 countries. Used a combination of C++, VB6, SQL Server, MSMQ and (D)COM and worked closely with traders and quants in a highly time-pressured environment.

C++ developer at this start-up creating bespoke solutions for financial companies using Microsoft technologies. Worked on a wide variety of projects, including many trips abroad to deploy & support systems at customer sites. A valuable introduction to the full software lifecycle, as well as showing me what does and doesn’t work in a dev team.