Twenty years building software, most of them in the UK. The roles clients ask about, most recent first.
deskbird
Staff engineer. deskbird is a Swiss workplace-management company. I set the architecture and the engineering standards the team built against, and wrote code against them myself. A good part of the job was coaching: reviewing other engineers’ work and pairing on hard problems, so the standards were something the team chose to follow.
Worldpay
Senior solutions architect, and principal software engineer before that. Worldpay processes card payments at global scale, and I spent four years there across the two roles.
As principal engineer I designed the services behind an international payment platform carrying more than sixty alternative payment methods, working across six development teams in-house and near-shore. I introduced git, a RESTful approach to building platform components, and the HMAC authentication standard the platform used, and co-authored the internal REST and logging guidelines.
As solutions architect I worked across alternative payments, the payment gateways, the acquiring platform and data analytics, led a team of architects and engineers, and headed the design and development of Payment Advisor, a forecasting and alerting platform for payment traffic. I was also a core member of the SWAT team, the group pulled in across the enterprise when a situation needed senior people on it quickly.
Trainline
Senior software engineer. Trainline sells rail tickets across the UK and Europe. I worked on the back-office support services and on mobile ticketing: the services behind the tickets and the integration that put them in the mobile apps. I also mentored engineers and helped with hiring.
Nokia
Software services team leader, on Vertu. Vertu was Nokia’s luxury handset business, sold with a concierge service behind it. I planned and designed its Customer Data Integration Hub, which sat between customer registration, the CRM and the service providers, so that an owner got the same experience whichever provider they were dealing with. I gathered and prioritised requirements across several business units, ran the development process with about ten third-party suppliers, and managed a near-shore team in Slovakia.
The rest
Twenty years covers more than four jobs. The full history is on LinkedIn, and I’m happy to talk through any of it. If this is the kind of experience you need on your team, tell me what you’re building.