Experience

Principal Software Engineer

Strategy / vision
Force multiplier
Mentor

test

A bright pink sheet of paper used to wrap flowers curves in front of rich blue background. Generated by Midjourney - Cyberpunk
  • Leading multi multidisciplinary teams of a total of 40 technical employees. Period: 2015 - 2022

Experience

Leadership

  • Leading multiple project teams to work on a single product. Up to 40 technical employees working on the same product and a total workforce of 110 team members.
  • Transforming a proof of concept product to that enabled the company to win a 150 million bid winning product and becoming the companies flagship product.
  • Leading a team of 40 highly effective professional to success.
  • Onboarding and mentoring an autistic professional software engineer via auticon in the wider product team.

Architecture

  • Enabling the firm to win a multi-year contract with the British government. Designing and implementing product solutions by coding prototypes to production-ready solutions; Resulting in a multi-year running product that enabled the firm to win contracts with the British government.
  • Designing a solid cloud-native (Azure), event-driven, scalable and distributed microservice architecture to handle expected and unexpected demands by using serverless (Azure Functions), containers (Docker), cognitive services (NLP (AI)) and various cloud provided technologies.
  • Consulting the technical and security teams of several countries to ascertain whether the proposal complies with their permitted technology stack and security requirements.
  • Security first approach from training the technical teams, reviewing deliverables, enforcing static code analyser (SonarCube and Fortify ) and reviewing pen test reports to find additional improvements to be made.
  • Adopting the position of various key people in the product team when they were unexpectedly unable to work. Ensuring continued operation without a reduction in productivity while looking for a long-term solution.

Stakeholder Management

  • Explaning technical cases in a non-technical way to .. with non-technical stakeholder.
  • .

Force multiplier

  • .
  • .

Leading the development, architecture, security and technical strategy from concept to launch for a Cloud based SaaS product. Consulting the technical and security teams of several countries to ascertain whether the proposal complies with their permitted technology stack and security requirements.

Building, coaching, and mentoring others by being their force multiplier by proactively assessing their processes and providing advice on how to improve their outcome. Advising engineers (eg. Software, DevOps / Data Engineering / Quality Assurance) from leads to juniors on their coding practices, SDLC and other core software principles and supporting their business cases. Sharing and gaining knowledge outside the product team by presenting during engineering cascades, participating in architecture and principle engineering boards.

Technical decision maker and accountable for the entire technology stack as solution architect. Attending product steering committee meetings to discuss long term product strategy. Sharing potential product enhancements that the steering committee should consider based on available technology.

Participating in sprint refinements when a new set of technology is enrolled towards a product team. Ensuring the team has the full picture to minimise implementation time and answer any question from the members.

Collaborating with product owner(s) and key stakeholders to evaluate new features and provide first-hand feedback on how technology would meet their expectations before it reaches the technical teams. Flagging any obstacles from unrealistic time frames to security and architecture concerns, and providing alternate solutions to overcome any of the flagged obstacles. Reducing context switching of the technical teams.

Ensuring quality by monitoring the estate, hands on pair programming and participating in code reviews.

Taking the role of technical advisor during sales conversation. Answering client technical questions regarding the product. Ultimately winning multiple contracts worth up to 150 million pounds.

Migrating TeamCity, Octopus and Jira to Azure DevOps.

Up to around 20% of hands on coding, resolving …

Team size up to 40

Product

Digital transforming the way how we learn.

Tech stack

  • Languages: C# (.NET Core & .NET Framework), Python, JavaScript, React JS, XAML
  • Infrastructure: Azure Cloud, IaC (Infrastructure as Code) with Terraform, Azure DevOps, TeamCity, Octopus, Docker
  • Deployment: Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, TeamCity, Octopus, Jira
  • Data persistency: Azure SQL
  • Data processing: Azure Functions, Azure Data Factory, SSIS
  • Testing: xUnit, Cypress
  • Security: SonarCube, Fortify
  • Integrations: Office 365 (Microsoft Graph), Amazon SES
  • Cognitive services (AI): Microsoft Search (Document extraction), LUIS (NLP / Natural Language Processing), QnA Maker

Proof of concepts

  • Extending the product with support for digital classes. Reducing the amount of manual work that was required to setup a course. Integrating with excisting tooling to reduce the impact on the service centre. Using excisting in-house application Using the Microsoft Graph to automate Microsoft Teams to organise digital classroom meetings. By utilizing most of the excisting technology we were able to deploy a working solution in two weeks time. The period from concept to launch (including trainig support centre) in production was two weeks which reduced the impact of COVID-19 on the department earning.
  • As part of the working in the flow of work focused created a proof of concept with Cortana virtual assistant to show the possibilities to learning partners.
  • ChatBot via Azure Bot Services