About

Work Experience

• Lead Software Engineer (IC), Codeweavers

  Jun, 2024 - Present

  • Personal highlight: Researched and overcame a critical business problem that was preventing upgrading from Postgres 10 to Postgres 15.

  • Onboarding: Identified and resolved a bottleneck during our engineer onboarding process that previously took weeks to complete. Now is fully automated and takes minutes to onboard a new engineer

  • Sustainability: Led the project migrate our source control from SVN to GitHub whilst maintaining history across 300,000 commits and carrying out the final migration in under 4 hours

• Lead Software Engineer (EM), Codeweavers

  Oct, 2022 - Jun, 20241 year 8 months

  Codeweavers acquired by Cox Automotive

  • Personal highlight: Built a platform observability pipeline utilizing GCP BiqQuery (dubbed WatchTower) that improves on the work done in 2018. Improving flexibility of analyses and scalability as we grow; ingesting on average 50 million rows per day over 650,000 requests. Currently storing over 88 billion rows and 15 terabytes.

  • Security: Implemented several account level improvements for external governance and compliance for corporate/enterprise level clients; rolling thirty day check, app-based and sms-based two-factor authentication

  • Sustainability: As the platform grew so did 'noisy neighbour' issues. As they become more frequent, I designed and implemented a system based on data egress so that would detect abnormal usage and would kick start a process in which we could engage pro-actively engage with the customer before it caused an outage

  • Cloud: Led a company-wide project to migrate on-prem front end applications to AWS. Evaluating different AWS services and setting the blueprint for future work

• Lead Software Engineer, Codeweavers

  Jun, 2020 - Oct, 20222 years 4 months

  Involved with high level quoting for new business and getting ahead of any showstoppers.

  • Personal highlight: Diagnosed and solved a long standing performance issue with one of our core applications that resulted in memory savings of 50%.

  • Tender: Helped get a large contract over the line when an external audit highlighted that internal staff using only username and password authentication was less than desirable. Solution involved migrating our source of truth to be Google SSO based and enforcing mandatory 2FA. This solution also simplified HR on-boarding and off-boarding.

  • Security: Red team exercise to see how vulnerable our password hashing was; ended up cracking 20% of all passwords within the platform and since then have seamlessly migrated to a key stretching algorithm. Also used the same data to nudge users to choose better passwords leveraging Dropbox's Zxcvbn.

  • Sustainability: Our costs in the cloud had spiralled out of control over a twelve month period; reduced AWS costs by 65% and GCP costs by 76%.

  • Scalability: Built a BigQuery (GCP) analytics pipeline that collected 300 million events per day, that has since scaled to 800 million events per day without any additional maintenance.

  • Continuous Deployment: Increased deployment throughput by 100% - taking our 'deploys per day' metric from 100 to 200.

• Senior Software Engineer, Codeweavers

  Jun, 2018 - Jun, 20202 years

  Started to work on the underlying platform as opposed to client facing projects. Naturally moved into a role where I was brought into teams to advise and help unblock particularly difficult problems. Officially responsible for performance, security, and optimization of the platform.

  • Personal highlight: Helped improve the "debugging on production" workflow by designing and creating call tree in joint ownership with the Director of Development

  • Security: Integrated into 'Have I Been Pwned' to improve end user security by detecting previously compromised passwords.

  • Maintainability/disaster recovery: Migrated our entire AWS configuration that was not platform-driven to be declared in Terraform and under version control - done without any negative impact to the platform.

  • Sustainability: Due to the nature of the data we process (e.g. bank details) many of the lenders we communicate with, insist upon client certs during initial connection negotiation. This was identified as a pain point when it came to annual renewal. Worked with senior management and key stakeholders at lenders to use Let's Encrypt to automate the entire process removing the burden from us and them.

  • Open source: Identified and resolved a late-night memory leak that would impact our SLA for our most important clients. The root cause was in our chosen serialization library.

  • Compliance/legal: Worked on making the company compliant with GDPR. Special focus was given to the aspect of keeping personally identifiable information (PII) data only as long as absolutely necessary

  • Auditing: Built a Cassandra backed immutable audit trail of who viewed what PII data, when, and why

  • Client projects: Experian, Barclays, Confused.

• Software Engineer, Codeweavers

  Jun, 2016 - Jun, 20182 years

  The platform features that I built in these years are still in use today to inform changes on hot-paths within the code base to maintain high performance code.

  • Personal highlight: debugged a previously unsolved problem that plagued our development and continuous integration (CI) machines that caused tests to run slow. This is where I really started to develop and hone my diagnostic skill set.

  • Monitoring and observability: designed, built, and architected a seam within the platform that collected metrics such as number of requests and time taken, using Cassandra as the backing data store

  • Platform functionality: pioneered the use of AWS SNS and SQS within the platform tier that empowered teams to leverage event based architecture to solve cache related problems.

  • Seductive adoption: designed the SNS/SQS seam so it was easy to use (so much so that other teams came to me almost demanding to use it), and consumers never had to worry about anything other than writing the abstraction.

  • Open source: identified and resolved a memory issue with the AWS .NET SDK.

  • Client projects: Close, Peugeot, Citroen, BMW and Mini, Blackhorse.

• Placement Software Engineer, Codeweavers

  Jun, 2015 - Jun, 20161 year

  Joined Codeweavers as a placement student whilst doing a top-up degree at Staffordshire University.

  • Personal highlight: being offered a full-time role only three months into my year-long placement!

  • Confidence building: delivered the Glasses project end-to-end to help drive a wider selection of vehicles for lenders that relied on that data set. This project was fundamental for me from a confidence point of view.

  • Client projects: Borderway, Cumberland, Anchor, JBR Capital, McLaren, Toyota, ADP Dealer Services, Blackhorse.

Skills

Education