Experience

I joined the DfE as Tech Lead on a new team to build a greenfield service. The service I came on to lead was a web application that allows schools across England to claim funding for the time their teachers spend training to be mentors for new teachers. As Tech Lead at DfE, my role exceeded the typical responsibilities of a Tech Lead into Engineering Management. I was responsible for managing the entirety of technical aspects of development along with developer processes and defining cross-functional workflows. One of my key achievements in this role is that I was able to lead the team to deliver our expected deliverables in line with our targeted launch dates with 1 less developer than initially resourced. The code is entirely open source and viewable at https://github.com/dFE-Digital/itt-mentor-services.

Towards the end of 2023, I became the solo founder of Spellbook Technology. Spellbook Technology has been a laser focus of mine throughout 2023 and I've put endless hours into building technical frameworks and processes that scale and adapt to varying preferences, situtations, and requirements. As a fully remote company, we excel at documenting decisions, outcomes, and learnings. We communicate asynchronously by default and sync up to keep everyone closely in the loop. In 2024, we're doubling down on our identity and you'll see more magic ✨ over the year.

Spellbook Technology is a young software development agency founded by a small group of enthusiastic technologists. It stemmed from our passion to giving small businesses unfair advantages and startups technical expertise. As a Co-Founder at Spellbook Technology, I put a strong emphasis on creating real business value for our clients. If you're in the market looking for a team of Ruby and JavaScript experts, please do reach out! Other than our core stacks, we also develop Go apps, hybrid mobile/web apps, and native mobile apps with both Kotlin and Swift. With a personal passion for performant and maintainable code, I coach and mentor our engineers to grow into autonomous and multi-talented professionals. We make magic happen ✨

As an Engineering Manager at Oyster, my role was to ensure the success of my team. By focusing on the team's needs, I led the Engineering efforts of the "Growth and Monetization" team in close collaboration with Product. As the first Engineering hire on the team, I laid down the initial foundations for the Monetization systems at Oyster. Shortly after, my role transformed into a Team Leader where I continuously collaborated with my team members to create Agile ceremonies that create value for all involved. If we could not extract value from a process, it was either dropped or transformed. During this span of time, we built a flexible and stable Monetization system. We increased revenue capabilities and greatly reduced any errors in pricing and discounts with complete auditability. As my first time leading a fully remote team across multiple time-zones, I am extremely proud of everything we accomplished alongside the healthy team dynamics and professional bonds formed.

I joined MUBI during the UK Covid Lockdown. This was my first experience of being completely remote. During my time at MUBI, I lead the development of many backend features. I also actively refactored legacy code and brought code more inline with existing patterns, such as converting a Notifications module to function similarly to Action Mailer. I promoted strong SOLID principles and applied them to the codebase, especially in parts with high rates of change. I took ownership of building best practices for the versioned API that we built to service our multitude of clients for Mobile, TV, Web and more. I also piorneered the adoption of Stimulus.js into our Rails rendered web pages to deprecate jQuery and improve the dynamic behaviours in the admin-facing pages. The final project I developed before parting ways with MUBI was the backend for the Notebook magazine subscription.

At Seekster, I evolved through the many stages of a startup's technical founder's responsibilities. As a Co-Founder, I not only performed the role of CTO, but also was heavily involved with all other non-technical aspects of the company, such as business and marketing strategy along with accounting and human resources. I developed the initial MVP and prototypes entirely with Ruby on Rails. During this phase, we pivoted our project and focused on our strengths and market needs to reach product market fit. We started our technical journey hosted on Heroku. Shortly after, we hired our first developers. I had my first taste of leading the technical culture and vision at a technical startup. Using both qualitative and quantitative data, we found our product market fit and platforms where users needed us most - Mobile. To keep things as simple and consistent as possible, I made the decision to drop server side HTML rendering completely from our Ruby on Rails application as we transitioned into an API-only Rails app with 3 sets of REST APIs - Customer, Provider, and Admin APIs. During our adoption of React for web, I developed our first Admin app prototypes and architected our internal best practices for React apps. We then took our learnings and rapidly developed our new React web app and consequently dropped HTML rendering. I also migrated us entirely from Heroku to AWS. After 2 years of creating a marketplace, I proposed to evolve our technology into a SaaS product. With great practices in place along with Ruby on Rails as our web framework, we were able to add a SaaS offering to our business within 6 months. To this day, many businesses are running on our software - Workforce. Some of my greatest achievements at Seekster include fostering high job satisfaction and technical culture along with extremely efficient resource and cost management. With a team of 7 full-time developers, we built Thailand's largest home services marketplace.