Mat | Engineering Leader

Personal Profile

An experienced engineering leader with a passion for people development, building teams, implementing agile methodologies, and focusing on flow and delivery. A broad history of working with teams using various programming languages, in fast-paced and regulated environments.

Has a track record of increasing team morale and motivation through a holistic people development style, recruitment, and introducing new ways of working. Has also developed strategies, technical roadmaps, architectural reviews, personal development frameworks, addressing technical debt and reducing cycle times significantly.

Holds an HND in Business Information Systems and an HNC in Business IT in Computing from Solent University. Was one of two people in his year to study French and Spanish at GCSE. Consumes an unhealthy amount of football (having seen 96 teams play live), and podcasts (with 231 subscriptions).

References and Recommendations

See LinkedIn for recommendations

Core Skills

Methodologies - Shape-up, Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, XP, TDD, Ensemble, No estimates,
Languages: C#, SQL, XML, PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Markdown, Ruby, Jekyll, Python, Sass, TypeScript, NodeJS, Blazor,
Testing: TDD, Nunit, Moq, Specflow/Cucumber, Selenium Web driver, pytest, Playwright
Source Control: TFS, Azure DevOps, Git, GitHub, subversion, CVS
OS/Cloud: Mac, iOS, iPadOS, Windows, AWS, Azure
Database: MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, MongoDB
Architecture: Micro-Services, Volatility, Domain Driven, Event Driven.
Software/Tools: Visual Studio, VS Code, Resharper, PhpStorm, TeamCity, PL/SQL Developer, MySQL Workbench, Office 365 suite, Slack, Trello, GitHub, WordPress, Mural, Confluence, Jira, Airtable, Code Climate, DataDog, working copy, Azure DevOps,
Leadership: Performance management, Recruitment, Leadership, Coaching, Mentoring, Personal development, Career development, Agile adoption, Ways of working, Stakeholder management, Advocacy, Radical candour, Requirement gathering, Workshop facilitation, Process implementation.

Side Projects

Created, published, and managed a football statistics website (WordPress, PHP, MySQL) and associated Twitter account, overseeing organic growth to peak 180,000 followers and global reach and featured in high-profile football publications.
Rebuilt a running club website using Jekyll, a static site generator using Ruby hosted on GitHub pages reducing operating costs by over 75% per year.
Using Github Actions and GitHub Issues to create a Security News feed for the discerning security professional or engineering leader.

Education Summary

Business Information Systems & Business Information Technology (Computing) HND, HNC at Solent University - 2001-2005
2 A Levels in Psychology and General Studies, BTEC in Business Studies.
10 GCSEs including English (double), Science (double), Maths, French, Spanish, and Geography.
See LinkedIn for various certifications

Employment History

Howden Insurance - Head of Web Development (June 2024 - )

Howden, is one of the biggest insurance firms in the world, and the 5th largest employee-owned business in the UK.

Heading up the frontend development centre of excellence with a focus on UI/UX across all digital products. Overseeing and coordinating a 4x increase in headcount in stream-aligned product teams. Led on improvements in ways of working and the adoption of TDD and social programming techniques and an increase in quality. Measuring DORA metrics and helping the team into good and elite categories. Development of incident management process.

Blackfinch Group - Head of Engineering (July 2023 - May 2024)

Blackfinch Group are investment specialists offering a range of AIM and EIS products including investment support in solar/wind energy and UK start-ups.

Implemented an agile approach across three teams building a sustainable pace for product delivery aligned to emerging business needs. Used a data-led approach recording DORA metrics and through objective setting and coaching saw the average cycle time reduce from 51 to 5 days. Implemented new working methods such as group/pairing and unit testing. Increased morale, motivation, and a value-driven team-first approach to work - resulting in more pair programming and TDD adoption. Carried out quarterly and probationary reviews. Hired first QAs into the business. Introduced a progression framework for career development. Developed a technical roadmap, architectural review and architectural design records, acknowledging and surfacing technical debt to stakeholders.

Seccl - Engineering Manager (June 2021 - June 2023)

Seccl’s technology helps advisers, investment managers, and fintechs of all sizes to operate their own investment platforms. Seccl is an API-first technology company operating in the wealth management and financial services sector as part of the Octopus Group.

Started leading multiple squads in the Investments and Advice tribe, focusing on delivery, empowering, and growing the engineers.Increased Team happiness metrics by 4 points (out of 10), +2.7 in wellness and +2.4 in overall engagement, +7.1 in relationship with peers within six months. Implemented a competency matrix, acted as head of engineering during a senior/c-suite leadership change. Interviewed and hired peers, was on the interview panel for CTO and HoE hires and contributed in non-engineering hiring sessions to support other hiring managers.

Moved to lead a team responsible for cloud infrastructure and developer enablement and support. Developed a roadmap to remove legacy cloud, poorly managed systems to managed services. Helped team deliver an automated client onboarding process reducing cycle time from approximately 6 hours to 3 minutes. Oversaw a DB upgrade well within deadlines and without downtime or customer detriment. Gave Technical debt and security greater gravitas within the organisation and helped construct a roadmap for remediation then led on transition to GitHub Enterprise and Advanced Security and the trial and implementation of DataDog, adding monitoring and observability capability for the first time. Replaced custom-built legacy CI/CD process on Jenkins to GitHub actions moving from monolithic deployments to individual components Oversaw remediation of infrastructure through a well-architected review with an AWS partner. Oversaw replacement of Kubernetes to ECR on Fargate reducing AWS costs by 10 per cent.

Higher Education Statistics Agency - Various (March 2006 - June 2021)

Collects, processes, and publishes data about all aspects of the UK higher education landscape as the Designated Data body. Additionally acted as a Product Owner, (certified) Scrum Master, fire marshal and member of the Staff Forum.

Head of Software Development - (October 2019 - June 2021)
Lead Software Developer - (October 2018 – October 2019)
Software Developer - (July 2015 - October 2018)
Web Developer - (May 2011 – July 2015)
Data Analyst - (March 2006 – May 2011)