About

Scotland-based tech lead with a software engineering background, most recently leading a team building an infrastracture platform + tooling for various products to easily run high-scale workloads.
I enjoy adapting to whichever technologies, skills & roles can serve as the right tool for the job in order to provide maximum value.

Experience

Tech Lead; Platform Engineer

2020 - Present
SuperAwesome, an Epic Games company (Cloud Platform team)

Currently working on delivering and constantly improving an infrastructure platform + tooling to enable other engineering teams to easily run their workloads at scale and focus on application development.

  • Provisioning & maintenance of dozens of production Kubernetes clusters running across dozens of AWS accounts and multiple regions
  • Providing easy self-serve Terraform tooling for developers to consume regardless of TF/DevOps experience
  • Providing support to engineers of all levels with provisioning and managing their infrastructure using our tooling
  • Designing and planning work across many initiatives to further security, stability & scalability while balancing flexibility/autonomy of our engineering teams with consistency across our infra
  • Communication with leads from many teams to understand requirements and coordinate releases/improvements
  • Carrying out system design interviews & onboarding newjoiners

Stack: Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform, Python & bash scripting

Tech Lead; Full-Stack Developer

2015 - 2020
SuperAwesome (Kids Web Services)

Worked as a full-stack engineer and subsequently Tech Lead for Kids Web Services, a platform of tools and APIs with the aim of enabling engineers globally to create safe digital products & experiences for children.

  • Worked with stakeholders and PMs to define technical direction and carry out product vision
  • Implemented features and delivered requirements using a microservice architecture
  • Designed systems within strict limitations due to guidelines and regulations around children’s data privacy
  • Architected and optimised our systems to work at scale and handle several large launches involving being in the critical path of global applications used by millions of children
  • Interviewed and trained new team members

Stack: JavaScript/TypeScript (NodeJS), AngularJS/Angular, Express/NestJS, Docker, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Kafka

Lead Software Developer & Sysadmin

2012 - 2014
Easy Website in a Box

As principal engineer, built a website creator for non-technical users, which eventually went on sale in physical boxes in high street stores across the UK.

  • Set up and maintained the infrastructure
  • Wrote the first version of the entire system; led hiring & oversaw development of further iterations of the system

Stack: PHP, MySQL, AngularJS, Nginx, Linux

Projects

Some side projects built for fun and/or for educational purposes:

MyNiftyTown (2021) - NFT based town-building & resource-collection game; started building to learn Solidity & gain experience deploying smart contracts to the EVM as well as interacting with them using Web3 tooling.
Alexa Bitcoin Wallet (2019) - Fun project for display-enabled Amazon Alexa devices enabling audio-based balance/transaction count checking, QR code display for addresses, etc. for a specified HD wallet.
Bitcoin Cache (2017) - Web app enabling creation of password-encrypted Bitcoin Cash wallets that could be topped up and easily shared with friends/family using a link as an introduction to cryptocurrency, with the idea of fast onboarding without having to get people to set up a wallet beforehand.
Lab checker (2016-2019) - Part-time project building an automated lab system for university lab sessions, to give out assignments, take submissions and compile & provide automated feedback to students before sending to lab assistants for checking. Currently used by my university in production for managing lab sessions.

Skills & Proficiency

AWS/Cloud

Terraform

NodeJS (Javascript/Typescript)

Kubernetes

PostgreSQL

Linux

Frontend JS / HTML / CSS