- Allocate SoftwareEngineering DirectorSOFTWARE PUBLISHINGOctober 2020 - September 2021 (12 months)London, England, United KingdomAs part of the acquisition of Selenity I was employed at Allocate Software as an Engineering Director. Reporting to the Head of Engineering, I retained responsibility suite of Selenityproducts coming into the organisation. My responsibilities included roadmapplanning, development scheduling, sprint delivery and product deployment.Moving into a larger organisation, I was also responsible for helping merge myprevious department into the new organisation. Adapting Allocate's processeswhere applicable or being an ambassador of why we did things in a certainway. Mapping responsibilities to the correct departments in Allocate if they didnot align with Selenity and ensure a smooth transition.A few months into the role I was asked to take overall responsibility for another product “in crisis”. It was a SaaS based product acquired from another organisation. A failed release had resulted in an unusable product which left as was would have resulted in thousands of temporary NHS workers not being paid. The product did not scale well and the working practices throughout the development lifecycle were inadequate.Due to my experience and skill set my brief from the Engineering Director and CTO was to “fix it” and I was given one contact to get in touch with. Gaining a new team, I solved the immediate problem of the failed release before getting to understand the working practices, failures in process, software inefficiencies and deployment strategy. I slowly introduced better processes and created a project plan to redeploy the failed release and make the product more stable and scalable. Whilst I was only working on the product for 9 months before I left and did not see the full plan through to completion, I am happy to say I left it in a better place than I found it.
- Selenity LtdChief Technology OfficerSOFTWARE PUBLISHINGJanuary 2005 - September 2020 (15 years and 9 months)Lincoln, England, United KingdomAs Chief Technology Officer I had overall responsibility for the development and maintenance of our portfolio of Software as a Service applications. This included keeping software compliant, reducing technical debt, building new features and ensuring performance and scalability. Whilst I had overall responsibility for departmental strategy, I was always hands on in helping teams implement our vision and goals.My key responsibilities included:Responsibility for the product roadmap. Liaising with sales and service teams to ensure a balance of new features and reduction of technical debt. Collating feature requirements, high level planning and more granular planning as work items were ready to be developed.Responsibility for production systems. Release upgrades and contractual uptime requirement of 99.99%.Support for meetings with prospective clients where a technical presence was required.Overall responsibility for ISO 27001 certification in the organisationIncreasing department productivity by adopting new techniquesMentoring junior members of the teamAssisting in problem solving of technical issues.Key achievements included:Development of mobile application for our Expense Management solution using Xamarin and later React Native.The management of several infrastructure migrations including: Dedicated to cloud, hybrid dedicated/cloud and full cloud on Microsoft Azure.Implementation of ISO 27001 and 10 years of successful audits.Implementation of full Agile methodology across multiple products and multiple teams.Scalability of software from 0 to over 400 customers.Rewrite of a bespoke reporting engine from a windows service to a microservice using .NET core Web API. Testing time was reduced from 2 months of manual testing to a fully automated suite of tests that ran in under 20 minutes.Transition from a 20 year old monolith architecture written using Microsoft ASP.NET Webforms to a microservice architecture.Implementation of a DevOps culture.Reduced release period of new versions to production from 1 year to every 2 weeks.Introduction and integration of offshore teams in India.
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- Bsc It & Computing (hons)The Open University2002