Head of Architecture
Talent Consulting (2021 - present)
Technical
Brought in as an architect and 'head of' role to help create a permanent talent team and support our existing public sector contracts.
Responsible for overseeing the delivery of over 10 contracts in the public sector posting up to 200 people in role across all engineering roles
Responsible for the lead role in moving our public sector client to a hub and spoke architecture in Azure. Alongside our Palo Alto expert, created HLD
and LLD documentation for Palo Alto virtual firewalls in the hubs for central network management via panorama. All documentation to GDS standards and
reviewed and signed off by the senior stakeholders. This review also contained reviews of the decommission of expressRoute and firewall harmonisation
across the 7 tenancies owned by the client
Conducted a review of the Identity and Access Management (security operating model) for public sector dept, focusing on 7 Azure cloud tenancies and their
RBAC and access controls. Presented a roadmap
for the dept going forward in the next 3 years to move to a single tenancy, simplifying network, access control and providing savings of at least £1m per annum
Management
Building a business plan for how I want the dept to grow, including milestones for growth and how I see the organisation changing in the next 3 years. Building in
specific solutions for problems as we grow, for example, line management of people, collaboration sessions, ceremonies, employee well being and D&I.
Presented to senior management and got sign off on the plan
Candidate packs created for each role required in the permanent team and holding regular catchup's with our recruitment teams to guage
progress in getting the right people. I also conduct interviews and delegate where necessary as the team grows
Building a company identity on the web, especially for tech people through github. Initiated a handbook for 'What Talent stand for', allowing public
consumption of our ways of working and how you join and what to expect from Talent.
Applications Architect
CompareTheMarket (2017 - 2021)
Technical product owner for our Pricing platform and Partner Risk Mapping service. These
systems are the 1st class citizens of the business and hosted in AWS. Responsible for 3 tech leads
and a developer team of around 20.
Responsible for the architectural vision for the new Pricing Platform at CompareTheMarket.
Focused on developing scalability, stability and security for the system, keeping the
customer at the centre of our business.
Moved the platform over to a micro-service architecture from on premise over a period of 2 years.
Went from intra month deployments to daily real time deployments and better scalability under heavy load, thus reducing our costs by 25%
Architected and developed a new real-time quotability system allowing fast feedback of issues and problems at
our providers. This reduced our time-to-fix from hours/days down to minutes.
Chair of Technical forum, and many working groups, including concepting and rolling out
common initiatives across the department. Contract testing introduced reducing our incidents on deployment
Introduced the concept of having a service catalogue and giving teams the power to automate the population of the catalogue. This
had an effect of driving generation of our documentation, allowing us to reduce the mean time to failure during incidents. Also
allowed us to automate a lot of the immunisation reporting
Introduced automation of specific immunisation tasks hosted on our own AWS github action runner. Scheduled on cron timers each micro service
repo can be scanned via sonarqube, checkmarx and owasp zap
Attended many tech leadership, speaking and influencing workshops where the lessons
learned were implemented in real world to bring people along in the journey at
CompareTheMarket.
Technical Lead Developer / Architect
CompareTheMarket (2016 - 2017)
Leading a team which concepted, developed and maintained the new Pricing Platform. Developed
with security, scalability and diagnostic capability up front
Supporting up to 10 journey and retrieval transactions a second and hosted in AWS implementing
EC2, Lambda, S3 and CodeDeploy
Swagger specifications defining REST endpoints to communicate with the system all secured
by bearer token through OAuth
Mentoring and helping form the career paths of the developers in the team
Consultant Lead developer
CompareTheMarket (Energy and Motor Journeys 2013 - 2016)
Architected and developed with the team the concept of taking a picture of you energy bill
on an IOS app and getting a quote
MongoDB use for storage and hosted in AWS. AngularJS for front end
Administration site in bootstrap using AngularJS
Developed a re-buy portal for Customers to one-click for renewal
Consultant
Easyjet (Seat purchase: Consultant (2012 - 2013)
Part of the team developing one of the first seat selection services by the airlines. MVC and
knockoutJS solution hosted on Microsoft Azure
Developed Azure ServiceBus solution for 3rd party provider to access Restful API to pass
pluscard data for real-time validation. Required to allow validation of card at booking time
Implemented PHP client for 3rd party to access windows Azure ServiceBus
Consultant
Tesco Entertainment (2011 - 2012)
Part of a team developing new functionality on the www.tescoentertainment.com website and supporting applications. Using Agile (SCRUM) to plan and present on bi-weekly sprints
Developed concept Android application using Java supporting purchase and download of MP3 tracks within time and budget allowed. Picked this up as a project alongside the dot net development I was brought in to start
Maintained and developed new functionality on the Endeca search service used by the main entertainment site
Developed the price cross out (was/now/save) for all 400,000 products and saw successful
implementation to live
Consultant
Cambridge University (OCR) (2008 - 2011)
Part of a team developing new functionality for the main OCR Examination portal for Cambridge University. A site that supports a base of 35,000 different centres across the world managing their candidate entries and results through one site. Developed under Agile (SCRUM) split into bi-weekly sprints and presentations using new MVC design pattern
Lead developer to upgrade existing disconnected entry sites into one site where users can manage their GCSE and Vocational Qualification data in one area saving users time when entering candidate entries
Responsible for bringing Code review and new unit testing methods into the department
Developing process of silent deploys removing site downtime in many cases
Director
TouchScreenData (Director 2004 - 2008)
Formed company developing online management systems predominately written in C# .NET 2.0/3.5
but small scale sites developed in LAMP
Tendering and presenting our solutions requiring good communication and the ability to
describe technical solutions to a wide audience
Other
1994 - 2004
Thompson Reuters
Developer writing financial applications for the city.
Merrlll Lynch WAP site developed in PHP and Windows based apps written in .NET 1.0.
Implemented world cup SMS messaging service with Tib Rendezvous messaging platform
Maintained and developed new pager systems on the front and back ends using Java and websphere and apache tomcat to host
ICS Triplex
Safety Critical systems for the Oil and Nuclear industry.
Embedded software development with external company audits
Emerson Liebert
Developing embedded software control systems for Unninterrutible Power supply units