About

Work Experience

• Director of Engineering, Buckhill Ltd.

  May, 2012 - Aug, 202311 years 4 months

  Technology leader with focus on streamlining processes and adopting modern technologies to accomplish given goals.

  • Oversee the end-to-end software development lifecycle.

  • Design, develop, and maintain the InsurTech Platform as a Service with Multi-Cloud deployment support.

  • Lead a team of software engineers in designing and developing the ongoing InsurTech API platform, with a focus on rating engine implementation and security.

  • Create a build process and rule-set for continuous testing and containerization build.

  • Design and develop an Identity Access Management platform with Multi-Factor Authentication capabilities, supporting hardware tokens like Yubikeys.

  • Make decisions on software and frameworks to leverage popular frameworks with available learning materials and onboarding support.

  • Collaborate with cross-functional teams and stakeholders to gather requirements, ensure successful project delivery, and drive continuous improvement.

  • Implement in-browser test automation using Cypress and perform multi-device integration testing with Amazon Device Farm.

  • Place a focus on automation and AutoDevOps to eliminate errors stemming from human factors and repetition, minimizing technical debt and errors incurred by manual work.

  • Implement internal tools and rules targeted at hosting codebases and storing sensitive credentials and secrets used within the organization.

  • Drive the philosophy of 'code as documentation' and enforce documenting APIs using OpenAPI standards. Lead an R&D team that created internal tooling targeted at generating GraphQL schemas and OpenAPI specs using a code-as-documentation process.

  • Lead talent acquisition and developer onboarding processes.

• Head of Software Engineering, Buckhill Ltd.

  Jun, 2008 - Aug, 202315 years 3 months

  Started my tenure as Head of Software Engineering to facilitate company's transition into Insurance Technology space.

  • Lead the Research and Development team to create the Insurance Platform as a Service product.

  • Conduct user research, usability testing, and gather feedback to inform design decisions and iterate on product designs.

  • Develop front-end interfaces for the company's flagship product using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

  • Establish and enforce coding standards, development processes, and best practices to ensure high-quality software delivery.

  • Lead teams of developers and designers as the Head of Software Engineering, overseeing their day-to-day activities, project assignments, and performance evaluations.

  • Build and manage cross-functional teams, fostering a collaborative work environment, along with mentoring and coaching engineers.

• Senior Software Engineer, Buckhill Ltd.

  Jun, 2006 - Aug, 202317 years 3 months

  Created a suite of small-business products for use with local businesses in UK

  • Develop ecommerce solutions.

  • Develop call center solutions.

  • Develop veterinary practice management software.

• Web Developer / Freelancer, Self-employed

  Jun, 2001 - Jun, 20065 years

  Website developer and contractor

  • Develop websites.

  • Develop micro-websites for universities.

  • Optimize CSS/HTML

  • Develop CMS (Content Management System)

  • Develop an in-office collaboration suite for file sharing, targeting the creation of a monthly shareware CD/DVD that shipped with the PCChip magazine.

  • Manage and maintain physical servers.

Projects Experience

• Claims Management System

  Jan, 2022 - Aug, 20231 year 8 months

  Led implementation of customer-story driven specification to expose standalone insurance claims management system

  • Implemented customer-story driven specification.

  • Created a relational data model.

  • Designed fraud detection primitives.

  • Conducted integration tests to match defined outcomes.

  • Implemented AutoDevOps to reduce errors due to human factors.

  • Established observability.

  • Enforced the philosophy of 'code as documentation' to drive implementation of GraphQL and OpenAPI schema tooling.

  • Oversaw deployment and builds for Kubernetes targets.

  • Mentored and onboarded backend and frontend teams.

• Underwriting Workbench

  Jan, 2021 - Aug, 20232 years 8 months

  Configurable, alternate viewer of insurance policies allowing configurable views of policies and insurance products intended to ease policy administration for Underwriters

  • Led the R&D team and discovered the necessary use case.

  • Led the UI/UX team.

  • Reduced the complexity of the application by introducing GraphQL, eliminating the need for stacks and languages outside of the JavaScript ecosystem.

  • Provided infrastructure configuration to avoid the need for SSR by innovatively using nginx and its regular-expression based routing rules to deliver statically generated pages.

  • Created a set of reusable Vue.js components using the Composition API (Vue 3) to expose reverse geocoding/map view capabilities.

• OPAL Insurance Platform

  Jan, 2019 - Aug, 20234 years 8 months

  Large-scale, multi-cloud insurance policy and claim management system

  • Collaborated with cross-functional teams to create an entire solution for insurance policy management, selling, and reporting.

  • Led backend development and implemented GraphQL, focusing on parallelization and performance.

  • Collaborated with cross-functional teams to implement multi-cloud deployment and backup.

  • Orchestrated the automation of in-browser tests using Cypress and the Amazon Device Farm service.

  • Served as the principal architect behind the observability platform suite used to monitor transactions, micro-service status, service status, and user experience, aiming for proactive support.

  • Led requirement gathering and vetting, ensuring successful project delivery and driving continuous improvement.

• Authstack IAM

  Jan, 2016 - Aug, 20237 years 8 months

  Authentication and Authorization suite featuring SAML 2.0, OpenID Connect and OAuth2 protocols with support for MultiFactor Authentication, for seamless and secure authentication across multiple applications.

  • Developed an API to support SAML 2.0 and OpenID Connect Single Sign-On protocols.

  • Added support for the OAuth2 authorization protocol to the API.

  • Developed a pluggable authentication driver system to seamlessly integrate with existing systems based on LDAP or custom solutions, facilitating non-invasive augmentation of existing infrastructure.

  • Exposed a mechanism for adding multifactor authentication with support for HOTP/TOTP protocols (RFC 4226 and 6238), as well as Yubikey hardware tokens in OATH/Yubico/U2F modes.

  • Created a set of extensible UI components to enable per-client branding.

  • Developed an auxiliary tool called Authstack User Directory to enable multi-user sources and replace LDAP-based solutions.

  • Conducted client consultations to determine the required levels of SSO/MFA.

  • Established observability rules to detect potential breaches in conjunction with invalidation/alerting services.

• C2MS

  Jan, 2008 - Aug, 202315 years 8 months

  Backbone of Insurance Platform as a Service product featuring full-set API for designing and managing insurance policy lifecycle, principal architect and hands-on manager.

  • Designed the API and API versioning, supporting multiple programming languages.

  • Led the research behind the rating engine used with policies to facilitate a configurable system aimed at saving time while creating rules for rating policies.

  • Created the storage data model that supports versioning and data immutability to adhere to standards regarding insurance policy data retention and policy updates.

  • Designed a hybrid storage model to support multiple different insurance products within the same cloud environment.

  • Created, tested, and optimized the recording of financial transactions with persistence and reliability in mind.

  • Facilitated an enterprise service bus using ZeroMQ and background async/parallel processing using PHP, later superseded by Temporal workflow orchestration.

  • Created UI components intended to facilitate easy insurance policy product build and testing.

  • Developed testing processes and build procedures to enable AutoDevOps and a predictable delivery schedule.

• Internal tools and systems

  Jan, 2008 - Aug, 202315 years 8 months

  Developed and curated a set of tools and procedures to drive change, improve delivery and optimize time-to-completion.

  • Introduced Gitlab and transitioned to a self-hosted Gitlab instance using physical servers to reduce the possibility of sensitive data leaks.

  • Introduced Gitlab CI/CD using Kubernetes runners.

  • Implemented BitWarden password manager at the organization level, using a self-hosted instance. BitWarden is used during onboarding/offboarding to provide new team members with necessary logins, avoiding the need to contact the support department.

  • Led the development of PDE - Programmer Development Environment, a set of services used by developers to create replicas of the production environment using containerization technologies.

  • Oversaw the development of PDE addons in the form of Bash/ZX scripts that bootstrap projects developers work on using PDE.

  • Introduced and implemented Sentry, Grafana, and Loki - the foundations of the observability platform.

  • Defined and developed onboarding/offboarding procedures and processes.

  • Introduced Satis: Simple static Composer repository generator, a repository for internally developed PHP libraries that follow PSR standards.

  • Introduced Verdaccio: a self-hosted internal NPM package manager.

  • Organized and maintained a private NPM for the company's development and deployment requirements.

  • Introduced Swagger (renamed to OpenAPI) and GraphQL to public APIs.

  • Implemented and organized internal Identity Access Management for the purpose of establishing a Security Center.

  • Introduced, practiced, and advocated agile methodologies at the organization level.

  • Created and maintained Confluence pages with Research & Development updates on tools/services/stacks being evaluated for use with the Insurance Platform.

Skills

Education

Interests

References