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Software engineer with 9 years of experience in building web services

About

Solutions Engineer and Backend Engineer with 9+ years building production systems that scale. Currently leading GenAI strategy at NBCUniversal while maintaining hands-on engineering excellence. Proven track record of translating VP-level requirements into technical solutions, optimizing systems for performance (90% latency reduction), and saving $240K annually through strategic infrastructure improvements.

Technical Skills

Job Experience

NBCUniversal

Solutions Engineer 2024 - present
  • Lead technical strategy for department's first production-ready GenAI system, translating VP-level requirements into engineering deliverables and managing cross-functional stakeholder relationships across multiple teams.
  • Serve as GenAI subject matter expert, architecting custom solutions on AWS and Azure platforms while guiding organizational adoption strategy and best practices.
  • Direct engineering team development from concept to production, balancing 40% hands-on engineering with 60% solution architecture and technical leadership responsibilities.
  • Collaborate with product teams on operational impact assessment, ensuring robust monitoring and observability strategies are in place before feature releases.
  • Delivered critical GenAI incident management tool for 2024 Olympics streaming platform in 8 weeks, supporting millions of concurrent viewers during peak sporting events.
  • Architect solutions for Event Management Platform, overseeing third-party contractor integrations while maintaining company standards and operational excellence.

Sky UK

Software Engineer 2021 - 2024
  • Built and maintained high-performance Go microservices handling real-time data ingestion from multiple third-party sources via BigQuery and PostgreSQL pipelines, serving the global streaming organization.
  • Designed and implemented scalable RESTful APIs processing millions of requests, architecting efficient data flows between microservices and external data providers.
  • Developed critical developer productivity tooling in Go for operations teams, streamlining deployment workflows and reducing manual intervention across the engineering organization.
  • Re-engineered NodeJS API Gateway to Go, achieving 90% latency reduction (2s+ to <200ms) through optimized concurrent processing and efficient memory management.
  • Implemented comprehensive APM across 50+ microservices using OpenTelemetry, enabling end-to-end distributed tracing and performance bottleneck identification.
  • Led backend standardization initiatives, reducing average issue resolution from 3 weeks to 1 week while establishing coding standards and CI/CD best practices.
  • Optimized logging infrastructure saving $240,000 annually through strategic log level management and retention policies across distributed systems.

Immediate Media

PHP Developer 2018 - 2021
  • Played a pivotal role in developing a new headless content delivery platform built on WordPress, utilising Symfony, Docker, and AWS technologies (Lambda, CodePipeline, ECS), demonstrating proficiency in modern web architectures and cloud services.
  • Engineered and maintained a new ElasticSearch 7 service and associated PHP microservice, showcasing expertise in search optimisation and microservices architecture.
  • Designed and implemented a related content module leveraging ElasticSearch similarity search, significantly enhancing reader engagement and content discoverability, driving measurable improvements in user interaction metrics.
  • Orchestrated the migration to Docker-based development environments, replacing Vagrant, which streamlined local setup processes and ensured local/production parity, resulting in substantial improvements in developer productivity and deployment consistency.

OpenCRM

PHP Developer 2015 - 2018
  • Contributed to large-scale web application development and delivered customized client solutions using PHP, MySQL, C#, VB 6, JavaScript, jQuery, HTML, and CSS.
  • Mentored an apprentice developer, demonstrating the ability to share knowledge and foster teamwork.

Projects

Generative AI Assistant

Sky UK

Led the development of NBCUniversal's first production GenAI assistant using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture, serving 1000+ internal users across multiple departments. Architected a scalable solution on Azure Container Apps integrating 50+ data sources with Azure AI Search. Built custom Python components for advanced query processing, multi-index search, and dynamic GPT-4 response generation. Managed executive-level stakeholder relationships and directed cross-functional development teams. Reduced information retrieval time by 75% and significantly improved decision-making processes across the organization.

Application Performance Monitoring

Sky UK

In preparation for a high-profile NFL game on Peacock, I led a performance optimisation initiative. We implemented APM across 50+ microservices, identifying a NodeJS API gateway as the main bottleneck. By rewriting it in Go, we reduced request latency from over 2 seconds to 200ms. I also introduced Smoke Testing with response time checks for ongoing performance monitoring. The project utilised Go, Prometheus, Grafana, Tempo, and OpenTelemetry.

Flexrole Discord Bot

Personal Project

To improve my Go skills, I created a Discord bot that tracks user activity in voice chats and assigns roles based on participation. This project helped me understand event-based architecture by implementing listeners for Discord events. I also built a dashboard using PHP (Laravel framework) and TailwindCSS, allowing users to configure the bot for their Discord servers. The project utilised Go for the bot's core functionality, with PHP, MySQL, and Laravel for the web interface.

Education

Baltic Training Services

Level 3 Software Development 2014 - 2015

After leaving school and sampling a college course I concluded an apprenticeship would prove a more successful career path for me. My apprenticeship with Baltic Training Services taught me invaluable skills in software development courses including C#, Visual Basic, MS-SQL, Unix, Software Development Process & Testing and Customer Services. During my time at Baltic, I gained commercial experience which has since allowed me to advance my software development career.