Description

I am a Senior Software Engineer with 14 years of experience, during which I have primarily worked on back-end systems. I have used a variety of technologies: FP & OO programming languages; relational & NoSQL DBs; traditional message brokers such as ActiveMQ and distributed event log systems such as Kafka; manual deployment of uberjar apps and modern containerised apps deployed onto Kubernetes.

As keen as I am on technology, I appreciate the importance of good communication, team dynamics and planning in order to build excellent software. I am a strong advocate of knowledge sharing, ensuring that I and my colleagues don’t become knowledge silos by writing wiki articles and highlighting where others should do the same. I take a lead in planning work by writing design docs and work tickets, splitting down and prioritising work to tackle risks early and ensure steady progress. I work together with product and engineering managers to clarify requirements and priorities, and summarise technical problems for the benefit of non-technical stakeholders.

I have combined my interests in Clojure and writing by creating a tech blog at One of my more popular articles - a critique of a config library usage pattern - has already been recommended within the Clojure community.

Industry field of expertise

Languages

English
Native or bilingual
French
Basic

Workplace preferences

Remote only

Primarily works remotely

Funding Circle UK
Senior Engineer
August 2021 - Today (5 years)
I work remotely on Kafka-driven back-end systems written in Clojure and hosted on Kubernetes. Initially I worked on our "decision engine" for assessing loan applications, which makes extensive use of the Clara Rules library. I now work on our line-of-credit product offering, which involves working on a number of smaller Kafka Streams services which involve collaboration with 3rd-party web APIs relating to card payment services. Alongside my day-to-day duties, I regularly conduct the technical segments of our interview process, am on the out-of-hours on-call rota responding to production incidents, and have mentored junior developers
● To progress a rounding issue with no quick complete solution, I researched & implemented approaches, analysed and measured results, created graphs, and presented options to help non-technical stakeholders decide on the best approach to take forward
● Introduced generative testing to a service to cover gaps in our test coverage for Kafka message serialisation issues
● Have created & distributed Emacs plugins & Babashka scripts to assist with common development and support tasks
WonderLane
Senior Software Developer
July 2019 - July 2021 (2 years)
Bournemouth, England, United Kingdom
Within a small close-knit company of around 30 people, I was a team tech lead of a sprint team of a few developers. I reported directly to our company directors on project progress, and often liaised with contacts from our key client, a large corporation in Dubai. Our main project was an electronic point-of-sale system involving Linux-hosted microservices written in Go and Android applications which ran on handheld payment terminals.
● Delivered projects within expected timescales by frontloading the integration of riskier elements such as new hardware/firmware modules & 3rd-party APIs, enabling this by initially implementing intermediary components with prototype code where needed
● Fixed a significant performance issue related to an obscure firmware bug, during which I gave regular written and verbal updates to both internal & external stakeholders
● Set up test environments on AWS EC2 to replace ageing in-office test servers
● Created & internally distributed a script to provision creation of a VM-based local test environment in order to provide developers with a faster test feedback loop
● Introduced unit tests to areas of the system with little to no unit test coverage
JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Software Engineer
June 2018 - July 2019 (1 year and 1 month)
Bournemouth, UK
I was part of an agile team that used Java to write extract-transform-load programs for the purposes of internal tax reporting. We used TDD, BDD and pair programming as standard practice, and we aimed to use Java in as much of a functional programming style as possible.
● Led a team of summer interns in writing an exploratory side project
● Led "lunch and learn" sessions on TDD