I’m an experienced engineer and leader. I like to solve problems elegantly, but know when to just get things done. I’m a voracious learner, and fluent communicator in words and pictures. I’m looking for fresh challenges and a bright team to tackle them with.

Skills

Languages: Go, PHP Tools: Git, Kubernetes, AWS Techniques: TDD, OOP, REST, Domain Driven Design

Experience

Form3

Staff Engineer, USA (FedNow) — 2022–Present

I support a team of engineers building real-time payment products. I keep the team effective by coaching engineers, reviewing code, and reinforcing good engineering practices.

I proactively identify and resolve blockers for the team. The scope of these interventions can vary from documenting a technical decision to coordinating across the org chart to make architectural changes. I recently led an effort to improve our core orchestration services, to allow teams greater freedom when implementing their market-specific workflows. Getting this moving involved a mixture of product knowledge and technical diplomacy.

Technical Lead, Information Security — 2021–2022

I onboarded and led a team of 8 senior security engineers. As we were somewhat outnumbered by the broader engineering team, I drove the introduction of a SecDevOps strategy to improve our relationships with colleagues, and ultimately our impact.

As an individual contributor, I coached our internal tooling team as they evaluated options and planned implementation of a new CI/CD pipeline. Supply chain attacks are a key threat, and my involvement with this project helped to establish a secure foundation that is still being built upon.

Technical Lead, Euro Services — 2019–2021

I led the build, launch, and production operation of three payment products in the European market. These include one real-time and two batch systems, handling payments for banks with over 1 million customers.

Senior Software Engineer — 2018–2019

I worked on the build of a real-time payments system, and built the initial implementation of our Confirmation of Payee product. I also contributed to the design of a new cross-currency product.

Senseye

Senior Software Engineer — 2017–2018

I developed and maintained back-end microservices in Go, and occasionally Node. I was involved in designing and developing some large features on the product roadmap, including our internationalisation infrastructure. I also worked to improve the testability of services, and vastly improved test run times to tighten engineers’ feedback cycles.

One iota

Technical Director — 2015–2017

I had responsibility for technical direction, and a pastoral role looking after our technical leads and over 25 developers across all disciplines. I represented the technical side of the company with clients, and the group board.

I worked to adapt our infrastructure and processes as we faced increasing scale of customer traffic and feature development. I facilitated teams’ work by improving business processes, development practices, and architecture. Having built up a monolithic PHP app, I led a transition to container-based deployment of some of our applications, using Go and Kubernetes.

Lead Engineer, MESH Platform — 2012–2015

I led a team building One iota’s core product, the MESH e-commerce platform. I balanced the needs of a growing number of internal and third-party API users as we expanded functionality and improved performance. I set up a new office in Wales, and hired engineers into the growing team.

Software Engineer — 2010–2012

I worked on a range of projects for an early-stage startup.

Others

• Teaching Assistant, University of Liverpool — 2007–2010
• Python Developer, Foresite Project — 2007
• Product Specialist, Audient — 2004–2006
• Drummer, Multi Purpose Chemical — 2004–2006

Education

• PhD Computer Science University of Liverpool — 2007–2010
• MSc Computer Science (Distinction), University of Liverpool — 2006–2007
• BA(Hons) Sound Technology (1st Class), LIPA — 2001–2004

Background

Originally from Glasgow, Scotland, I now live in West Wales with my wife, three children, and a dachshund. I enjoy riding bikes and playing drums, and learning Welsh.