Toby Richards Email & Phone Number

Swindon, England, United Kingdom

Swindon, United Kingdom

• Line Management of Engineers, actively supporting and developing their careers. Identifying gaps in capabilities, recruiting talented people to grow our capability.• Supporting multiple Agile Engineering teams by providing technical, agile and best practise guidance. Running stand-ups, Scrum of Scrums, working with other leaders to identify and implement improvements across multiple teams of more than 50 Engineers.• Set up, task managed and lead shift working support teams for a mission critical system that supports all of Nationwide’s electronic payments into and out from the Society such as Faster Payments, Bacs, CHAPS/Swift. Resulting in increased stability for this critical system and negligible downtime for our customers.• Management of partner contracts throughout their lifecycle with Accenture, IBM and TCS. Working with procurement, setting objectives, onboarding, regular management and reporting on achieving SLAs as well as KPIs.• Using my deep understanding of software development to coach Engineers in problem solving techniques, patterns, practises and improving communication enabling them to discover solutions for themselves.• Collaborating on standards and ensuring adherence to both Architectural and Engineering guardrails through monitoring and active support.• Promoting the use of collaboration tools such as Jira and Confluence through leading by example. Identifying risks, dependencies and raising them. Establishing ways to mitigate those risks.• Run sprint planning, retrospectives & refinement sessions. Actively help shape the vision and strategy in collaboration with leadership in my area to improve efficiency and reduce waste.• Acted as an RTE (as part of the SAFe agile framework) for 9 sprint teams, removing and escalating impediments, managing risk, communicating with stakeholders and driving improvements. • Continuously work on self-improvement through technical training, interpersonal skills and domain knowledge.

Cheltenham, Uk

• Designing system integrations for a complex Mortgage System used by multiple financial organisations in the UK specifically around handling payments with major payment providers. Enabling other payment integrations to be added without being overly complicated.• Providing technical leadership architectural decisions and governance for the development of new and existing sub-systems.• Using Agile techniques such as Scrum and Kanban to support project efficiencies.• Building the team to include input from all disciplines, defining processes and team goals that dovetail into the overall project objectives.• Leading the design and implementation of Continuous Delivery build processes that support Service Packs and hotfixes.• Promoting a DevOps culture allowing teams to be self-reliant and creating procedural efficiencies. • Designing and implementing an approach to performance testing.

Cheltenham

2013 - 06/2015 / Mortgage Systems and Originations V1 – SOA, .NET, WCF, SQL• Worked on many sub-systems of a large mortgage sales and originations SOA solution used by a tier 1 UK Bank and Building Society. • Responsible for several different roles from Development Leader to a more technical development position. • Designed new functionality to integrate with other third-party systems. • Provided architectural design and implementation support of a new payment integration. Working with the client to ensure a successful delivery.• Worked alongside the Lead Architect on a programme of transition to support the client taking responsibility for development. Creating training material to facilitate knowledge sharing with the client through a series of development workshops supported by a series of seminars.• Regularly reviewed others work, analysing requirements, improve processes and estimation of major development tasks (in the orders of hundreds of days). • Provided technical support to the client.2013 - 2014 / Wealth Management Point of Sale System - .NET, SPA, WCF • Provided technical leadership to the second phase of development for a Wealth Management point of sale system for a leading Spanish bank.• Providing architectural support by overseeing new functionality, documenting processes, identified improvements. • Analysing requirements, development estimation, reviewing of others code, deploying of deliveries as well as providing technical support.• This led to successful high-quality deliveries on time to the client.

Poulton, Cirencester

Wealth Management Point of Sale System - .NET, MVC, WCF • Greenfield solution proving architectural support and technical direction from the project’s inception through to delivery to the client.• Responsible for managing the team’s workload using agile methodologies and team leadership.• Managing quality through the promotion of best practices.• Supporting the client with runtime and installation issues, delegating when required.t.

1st-The Exchange WCF Services / SQL Server 2005 / Performance Tuning/ BizTalk 2009Support and development of their Enterprise Framework platform based on .NET 3.0 / 3.5. Fixing bugs, increasing code coverage, performance tuning and developing new services to increase the platforms capability. Finding SQL server issues in existing code. i.e. Fixing/creating indexes, profiling code.

NET Web Based Financial Point of Sale System - .NET 3.5 / SQL 2005/ Web Services / ASP.NET Development of a Financial Point of Sale System for a large UK banking group. Design and development in all Tiers. This included designing UI pages, business layer/objects and web services talking to SQL database to supply the data and the use of design patterns. Heavy use of NUnit, Cruise Control with MSBuild (Continuation Integration) to highlight any problems with the build. Extensive testing leading to a successful delivery to UAT. Unfortunately due to the financial market climate, the project was suspended early.

Nationwide Building Society SQL Server MI Reporting Suite - Reporting Services 2005 / SQL 2005 / .Net 2.0Lead a team of 9 developers based in London and Swindon developing a suite of 40+ SSRS reports and associated SQL stored procedures to support them, for the business users. This included communication with the users to better understand their needs and also to highlight potential pitfalls. Development of drill down reports, reports that included sub reports. This also included working with and developing a data warehouse design using star schema with fact and dimension tables that was used to ease the development of the many reports required. Was also responsible for implementing the reports into a live environment, finding and solving performance issues.

.Net 2.0 / ASP.NET / Web Services / SQL 2005Developed a web based workflow system for an administration team to organize their daily workload. ASP.NET 2.0 UI design and development, C# business layer, data access layer taking to SQL 2005 server for the data using stored procedures. This was a particularly interesting and the web site contents had to vary according to the teams domain permissions changing what users were able to do. Responsible to for performance testing and deploying the system to all environments (System Test, UAT, OAT and Live). The solution was load balanced and sat on multiple servers.

.Net 2.0 / Interop / Web ServicesDeveloped a bespoke web service to generate life insurance quotations on the fly for a 'Point of Sale' system. Web service development with COM interop to communicate with a 3rd party unmanaged calculations engine. SQL Server 2005 database design and stored procedure development. Load testing to ensure performance criteria were meet and responsible for deploying the solution to all environments (System Test, UAT, OAT and Live

Point of Sale' system - .Net 1.1 / SQL 2000 Web Applications / Web Services / Batch ProcessesLead a small team developing an incremental release of a 'Point of Sale' system to include new functionality. Design and development of the ASP.NET 1.1 UI, business layer, data access layer and SQL server database including stored procedures.The solution was load balanced and sat on multiple servers.

Point of Sale' system - .Net 1.0 / SQL 2000 / Web Applications / Web Services / Batch ProcessesDeveloped a web based Life Insurance Point of Sale system for use by branch staff throughout the UK. Created a web service to query real time data on an IBM mainframe. Design and development of ASP.NET 1.0 UI, business layer, data access layer, SQL Server 2000 database and stored procedures. Bespoke web service to enable to system to query data on an IBM mainframe for product information.; .Net 1.1 / InteropDeveloped a bespoke web service to expose a 3rd party SAS risk rating engine for use by a Win Forms application which is used to assess customer risk to the business. C#, VB.NET and COM+ to handle communications with the unmanaged code on separate boxes.

IBM Mainframe/COBOL/CAPSIL/JCL DevelopmentLead and were also part of various projects using the range of skills for IBM mainframe development. Designing UI pages and writing and maintaining batch programs. Later cross trained to the Windows / SQL Server world.

Tandem Mainframe COBOL, SCOBOL developer on the branch computer system

Maths, Physics, Art

Maths, Physics, Art

Education record