Career¶

5+ years July 2021 - present

Summary¶

Expend is a UK FinTech expenses software company with hundreds of customers, thousands of users and cards, fewer than ten developers.

In the last five years I've improved Expend's developer experience, platform stability, and increased velocity to implement new customer-facing features.

Architecture¶

Problem¶

I inherited a hybrid architecture which looked superficially like microservices but was monolithic in practice, without getting the advantages of either approach.

Solution¶

With 12 factor app principles in mind, I pulled apart the monolith to distinct projects with clear domain boundaries, and dependencies, and better tests to cover the API contracts with other services.

Benefit¶

This has improved the developer experience, reduced time between code change and deployment (including mean time to recovery), improved confidence that making a change is safe.

Infrastructure as Code¶

Problem¶

Cloud resources were maintained manually only by the CTO. No like-live test environment.

Solution¶

I introduced Pulumi as our Infrastructure as Code tool:

• made libraries to codify our common patterns
• established guardrails to prevent accidental destruction
• imported existing cloud resources
• deployed a new AWS staging environment

Benefit¶

This has made our environment more robust and scalable. Anyone in the team can make changes to cloud resources with confidence, and it's trivial to deploy new projects.

CICD¶

Problem¶

Our CI/CD was using an expensive software vendor, while being poorly understood and temperamental.

Solution¶

I migrated our CI/CD from an expensive software vendor to GitHub Actions.

Benefit¶

Cheaper, simpler, better understood. Less responsibility of running our own runner infrastructure.

To be fair, GitHub's own uptime has got worse in the last year or two.

Feature Development¶

I am also a big contributor to new feature development. For example, in 2025-26 I led the effort to integrate with a new Card Issuer partner.

Using my deep understanding of our previous integration, I took on temporary project manager responsibilities to break up the work into many sequenced epics. I communicated with the partner's consultant to analyse how our use cases could be achieved with their APIs and reports. Then implemented most of the back-end work and working closely with the team's front-end developers.

The migration to the new Card provider has gone smoothly with only minor bugs found in the back-end implementation.

4 years January 2017 - May 2021

I led a development automation team with a mission to deliver change to SaaS customers more frequently and more automatically.

I first focussed on making CIB/QA more automatically configured, more 'cattle' than 'pets'.

I wanted development teams to take responsibility and pride in their applications’ health and stability in CIB and QA.

We improved visualisation of system health:

• new health webpages on office TVs
• deployment status notifications by email and MS Teams

I streamlined the software delivery pipeline by back-porting legacy customisation layers that were historically added post-release by other siloed development teams. This shortened the release turnaround time by a few days per monthly release.

I led the development of a new automated configuration and deployment tool based on Rundeck, Ansible & Tcl. We accumulated a userbase community of development system owners. This reduced manual toil to deploy or upgrade the Fidessa trading stack compared to previous disparate manual practices.

My greatest achievement was a company-first of deploying a new green-field Internet-facing multi-tenanted trading platform:

• Using consistent automated deployment technology in all environments (Continuous Integration, Quality Assurance, User Acceptance Testing, Production)
• Straight from Development group, without hand-over to Delivery group
• Monthly, automated upgrade cycle rather than yearly, semi-manual

This resulted in the application developers being able to deliver value to market more rapidly than before. Overheads of supporting old code branches are minimal. Being multi-tenanted, the marginal cost of on-boarding additional customers is much lower than normal practice of purchasing and deploying to new hardware.

2 years July 2014 - September 2016

The role was a generalist mix of Implementation Consultancy, Project Management, Development, Testing, Deployment and Application Support.

I led a team of 3, responsible for several customers’ trading platforms. I managed 6-week back-to-back sprints for a high-profile customer.

• Liaised with customer-facing delivery managers and business analysts, to understand customer requirements
• Analysed requirements to produce solution design
• Software development / implementation
• Writing and executing manual test plans in User Acceptance Testing (UAT) environment
• Re-factoring or re-testing customisations following a major underlying software upgrade
• Coordinating patches/upgrades e.g. reacting to mandatory 3^rd party upgrades, or for regulatory compliance
• Deployment to Production with mix of manual action and automation
• issue triage and support, remaining calm in a high-pressure environment
• Coached and managed junior team members including SMART objective setting and one-to-ones.
• Gate-kept and code reviewed my team's work
• Proactively drove change to improve the department's procedures, documentation and tools.

4 years September 2010 - July 2014

Configured, customised and upgraded trading platform applications.

2009 - 2010

2006 - 2009