Engineer at heart, found working on products, projects, microservices & APIs in Node.js, familiar with relational databases, document-driven databases, templating, unit testing & devops.
Achievements
Strategy
- Experience in developing, reviewing & implementing product & technology strategies across startups & teams.
- Interacted with & presented to a variety of customers, founders, investors & other stakeholders.
- “Can do” attitude - adopting flexible principles to support new feature requests at any time.
- Planning for failure by consistently considering disaster recovery & redundancy.
- Building development & staging environments to design & test new features ahead of release.
Commercial
- Continuous focus on the end business goals.
- Identifying & eliminating bottlenecks in performance across the entire stack to improve user experience.
- Routinely using data-driven decision making to guarantee results.
- Creating new metrics to measure success & optimise all processes, workflows & user journeys.
- Implementing product feature-flags to enable/disable features on-demand.
- Performing live customer-facing configuration, setup & support.
- Answering user-facing queries & support requests.
- Handling IT administration & staff support.
Technology
- GraphQL & REST APIs
- Node.js (ExpressJS, Koa, Serverless)
- PHP (CodeIgniter, Symphony, Wordpress)
- Frontend (HTML, SCSS, React.js, Vue.js, Handlebars, Liquid)
- Relational databases (MySQL, MariaDB, Postgres)
- Document databases & search engines (DynamoDB, MongoDB, ElasticSearch)
- Infrastructure-as-code (AWS Cloudformation, AWS CDK)
People
- Working as part of varying-size teams to build solutions for business goals.
- Collaborating with third-party vendors & contractors to fulfil customer requests.
- Hiring & managing software developers, assisting with learning, professional development, mentoring & running training sessions.
- Creating teams with regular sprints & release cycles, sharing updates with the entire organisation.
- Organising & attending networking events & hackathons.
Recent Employment
BPP - Principal Software Engineer
Dec 2023 - Present
- Joined the (recently formed) Product & Technology department, developing applications & services for students, staff & administrators.
- Launched and supported a web application for prospective students applying for apprenticeships at BPP.
- Implementing features and services to address business challenges, like automated identity verification.
- Refactored services to enhance user experiences and developer experience, including shared libraries & ephemeral environments!
- Collaborating with cross-functional teams to bridge the gap between student, staff, and administrative experiences, ensuring an efficient & seamless journey.
Tech City Ventures - Head of Technology
May 2022 - Dec 2023 (1yr)
- Joined the team as the team lead, spearheaded the initial product development / release & restructured the team, including contractor evaluation & personnel optimisation.
- Continued success with monthly product planning & regular releases.
- Fast reaction with business pivot to API-first product, designed & built initial API version including various flows.
- Designed & implemented an integration framework to integrate with 3rd-party lender APIs for automatic account creation, loan disbursement & other banking features.
- Subsequent API features & performance improvements.
- Building internal tools for staff using external providers (Retool).
Real Links - CTO
January 2019 - April 2022 (3yrs)
- Joined as first hire after pre-seed round.
- Completed greenfield rebuild of existing site into SaaS multi-tenanted white-labelled platform operating on AWS.
- Designed & implemented an integration framework that adapts to any external system requirement, including SmartRecruiters, Greenhouse & Workday.
- Building internal tools for staff within core application.
muzmatch - Senior Backend Engineer
November 2017 - December 2018 (1yr)
- Joined as first hire after seed round.
- Migrated the platform to AWS from dedicated hosting.
- Reworked user onboarding to increase MAU & subscription dramatically.