Mat | Engineering Leader
Personal Profile
An experienced Engineering leader with a passion for people development, building teams using agile methodologies, and focusing on flow and delivery. A broad history of working with various programming languages. Has led multiple teams in fast-paced environments, implementing agile approaches and reducing cycle times significantly.
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, and addressing technical debt.
Holds an HND in Business Information Systems and an HNC in Business Information Technology 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 and podcasts.
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.
Employment History
Howden Insurance - Head of Web Development (June 2024 - )
Howden, formally A Plan, 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.
Leading 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.
Overseeing and coordinating a 4x increase in headcount in stream-aligned product teams.
Blackfinch Group - Head of Engineering (July 2023 - May 2024)
Blackfinch Group are investment specialists offering a range of products including tax-efficient investments for individuals and businesses plus offering investment support in solar/wind energy and UK start-up companies.
Implemented an agile approach to software delivery across three teams building a sustainable pace for product delivery aligned to emerging business needs, set up various team ceremonies, one-to-ones, and. Using 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 refinement, building out acceptance criteria, and unit testing.
Presented Engineering baseline and principles to the group. 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.
Worked closely with architect and IT/Ops to implement RBACs and environment management through IaC. 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 our engineers. Implemented a role/skill matrix during annual reviews - the first time anything like this was used in the company, acted as head of engineering during a senior/c-suite leadership change and aided recruitment of new CTO and HoE.
Currently leading the DevOps capability, 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. 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 from 6 months to the prior 6 months.
Built a recruitment process and question set for various roles and formalised a fair and systematic approach to recruitment hiring 12 engineers in the first 6 months. Contributed in non-engineering hiring sessions to support other hiring managers. Interviewed and hired peers and was on an interview panel for CTO and HoE hires.
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 - creating on-demand infrastructure triggered by pull requests 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 higher education landscape in the UK as the trusted source of HE data and analysis as the Designated Data body. In addition to roles acted as a Product Owner, (certified) Scrum Master, Staff Forum representative, and fire marshal.