Curriculum Vitae

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Contact Information

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dcjohnson85@gmail.com

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On request

Summary

I am an engineering leader who has worked in the technology industry for 15 years. Over the last 5 years, I have moved into a leadership role, from a hands-on technical lead, with line management responsibilities, to more recently an engineering manager, managing multiple teams. In addition to my management skills, I also come from a full-stack software engineering background and have contributed either directly or by leadership of my engineering teams on large-scale projects.

Project Contribution Highlights

Employment History

Blexr

Engineering Manager - CasinoReviews.com & Bonuses.com

Malta (Remote)

Jun 2023 - Mar 2024

Responsibilities

  • Line management of two teams of engineers.
  • Improve ways of working within the engineering teams.
  • Implement change throughout the company-wide technology chapter.
  • Set technical roadmaps for tribes.
  • Review team structure and technical skills.
  • Use tech to empower the other chapters and the larger company.
  • Identify single points of failure.

    • Key Achievements

  • Implemented SCRUM in all teams within my tribes which resulted in a better understanding of velocity and capability, leading to more accurate estimates and a reputation boost in terms of delivery for the team.
  • Implemented process of preview branches to reduce bottleneck between QA and deployment to production, which resulted in a more efficient pipeline in addition to enabling the engineers to release all tested changes to production, without the fear of releasing untested features. This in turn increased the rate of deployment.
  • Implemented company-wide DORA metrics, and provided knowledge transfer on what they mean, resulting in a better understanding of where our pain points were, and the overall health of the company's engineering function.
  • Defined technical roadmap for 2023 Q3, 2023 Q4 and 2024 Q1, providing visibility for the initiatives we committed to delivering in each quarter around operational efficiency, improving the development experience and improving the speed of delivery (reduction in lead time).
  • Acted as Head of Engineering and Principal Engineer due to lack of personnel, ensuring that there was adequate leadership from within the team to function, in the absence of dedicated personnel with these roles.
  • Improved QA process, introducing E2E and visual automation testing, allowing the team to identify issues earlier, resulting in improved throughput and higher quality of releases. This also improved confidence in the product deliveries.
  • Introduced up-time metrics to ensure the team were alerted as soon as an outage or incident occurred, enabling faster responses and a rapid return to a stable state.
  • Re-structured teams to improve knowledge transfer and operational efficiency, resulting in a more cohesive team and a better understanding overall of the entire product. This also removed single points of failure and improved an increase in velocity of feature development.
  • Delivered initiative to decouple engineering from content, to ensure that content could be delivered at pace without a requirement on engineering, resulting in the content team delivering to more markets, increasing traffic and revenue.
  • Designed a solution to allow content to increase the pace of new market launches further, by automating parts of the market cloning functionality, which when implemented, will result in decreasing the time it takes the content team to create content for new markets across the company.
  • Identified and documented single points of failure, ensuring we can plan and mitigate issues in the event of personnel leaving the organisation.
  • Introduced a GAP Analysis framework for my team (later adopted by other line managers) that tracks an employee's performance against the company-wide role definitions. This helped craft goals for each engineer to give them direction for their progress in their careers both inside and outside of the company, in addition to helping them move towards their ultimate career goals.

    • Reason For Leaving

  • Redundancy due to org restructure.

    • Skills

      Leadership
      Line Management
      Strategic Planning
      Capacity Planning
      Multiple Team Management
      SCRUM / Agile
      Performance Management
      Recruitment Interviews
      Stakeholder Management
      Team Goal / OKR Tracking
      Jira
      Notion

    HeliosX

    Engineering Manager - Checkout & Subscriptions

    London (Remote)

    Apr 2023 - Jun 2023

    Responsibilities

  • Take over running of the engineering team for flagship products.
  • Assess the technical skills within the team.
  • Review priorities and roadmap for product development.
  • Improve SCRUM processes and implement correct Agile working practices.
  • Ensure delivery of commitments by the engineering team.

    • Key Achievements

  • Implemented knowledge transfer of SCRUM, agile ways of working, estimation and velocity tracking, resulting in consistent delivery of commitments week on week. This also increased the frequency of deliverables and improved the internal reputation of the engineering team.
  • As interim product owner, I re-prioritised items on the product roadmap resulting in the delivery of revenue-generating initiatives sooner that boosted revenue by ~$12,000 per month.
  • Instrumental in defining the microservice architecture platform that the technology was to migrate to, resulting in a scalable architecture for the company to expand its user base.

    • Reason For Leaving

  • The company's financial state resulted in redundancies shortly after I joined. I was looking for a company with stability at this point.

    • Skills

      Leadership
      Line Management
      Product Management
      Strategic Planning
      SCRUM / Agile
      Performance Management
      Stakeholder Management
      Capacity Planning
      Team Goal / OKR Tracking

    Flipdish

    Engineering Manager - Web, iOS Mobile, Android Mobile

    Dublin (Remote)

    Jul 2022 - Apr 2023

    Responsibilities

  • Line management of three engineering teams (web, mobile iOS and mobile Android), on the company's flagship product.
  • Provide input into the company-wide technology division.
  • Deliver enhancements to the product, while reducing technical debt.

    • Key Achievements

  • Tracked team metrics to highlight areas for improvement. This resulted in pinpointing focus areas where the team improved in terms of operational efficiency, resulting in an improved speed of delivery and quality.
  • Reduced mission-critical technical debt around mobile implementations, ensuring that as ageing architecture is deprecated, the product was safe from exposure to security vulnerabilities, and outages due to unavailable dependencies.
  • Implemented changes to the address autocomplete behaviour, resulting in a reduced cost of Google Maps by a 3rd saving the company $1,500 per month.
  • Added recaptcha on public input forms and APIs within the main product, halting and further preventing attacks from automated bots, reducing the number of calls to our service, which protected our infrastructure along with increased costs for cloud services.
  • Improved accuracy of estimations and consistency of team commitments, providing a more reliable way to forecast work, and setting good expectations throughout the company.
  • Implemented SCRUM and Agile ways of working, resulting in the engineering teams moving towards repeatedly delivering on their commitments, preventing over-commitment and making all work visible.
  • Introduced 'Friday Fun' to add to the overall company culture, improving morale.

    • Reason For Leaving

  • The company started to have financial struggles, and I was looking for a place of stability at this point.

    • Skills

      Leadership
      Line Management
      Strategic Planning
      Multiple Team Management
      SCRUM / Agile
      Performance Management
      Recruitment
      Capacity Planning
      Stakeholder Management
      Team Goal / OKR Tracking
      Jira
      Notion
      CircleCI
      Git

    Truepill

    Lead Software Engineer

    Manchester (Remote)

    Feb 2021 - Jul 2022

    Responsibilities

  • Line manage a team of engineers.
  • Help grow the engineering function via recruitment.
  • Implement Agile ways of working.
  • Work 90% as line management and 10% as individual contributor.

    • Key Achievements

  • Delivered a new online pharmacy platform (http://costplusdrugs.com) that supports 2m+ unique visitors per week, driving revenue for the company.
  • Implemented and refined agile ways of working, moving the team towards working in SCRUM resulting in accurate estimations and setting of realistic expectations with stakeholders. This also highlighted additional recruitment requirements.
  • Acted as Engineering Manager on the new online pharmacy project (Cost Plus Drugs), resulting in a continuation of leadership and direction for the engineering teams in the absence of dedicated personnel.
  • Hired the first graduate in the company, resulting in a company-wide graduate program initiative being created.

    • Reason For Leaving

  • Decided to move on after the company fell into financial difficulty.

    • Skills

      Leadership
      Line Management
      Performance Management
      Software Architecture
      Git
      Next.js
      Node.js
      Koa
      NestJs
      TypeORM
      Jest
      Cypress
      Postgres
      MySql
      Rambda
      CircleCI
      Elastic Search
      Contentful / CRM
      Plytix Integrations
      Gatsby
      React
      CI/CD
      SCRUM / Agile
      Capacity Planning
      Jira
      Confluence
      Stakeholder Management

    AND Digital

    Senior Software Engineer

    Halifax, West Yorkshire

    Oct 2019 - Feb 2021

    Responsibilities

  • Work as an individual contributor within the software consultancy.
  • Lead on client-side projects.
  • Provide technical guidance and training for Junior engineers.
  • Provide career guidance for other engineers.

    • Key Achievements

  • Led the solution design and technical delivery of a front-end (angular 2) decision tree application for StepChange Debt Charity, resulting in on-schedule delivery, at a high level of quality and customer satisfaction.
  • Delivered of components for Lloyds Banking Group on their Scottish Widows pension platform, resulting in a more stable platform for their pension portal.
  • Delivered an external-facing website for Covea Insurance, creating a better user experience.
  • Trained junior engineers on programming best practices, resulting in a lift in the average skill level of software engineers within the Halifax club.
  • Advised engineers on SCRUM and Agile ways of working, resulting in engineers being able to on-board to client engagements, with less friction.
  • Hosted technical talks and "Lunch and Learn" sessions, providing additional upskilling throughout the Halifax club and wider company.
  • Advocated for junior engineers during progression discussions as their career coach, resulting in two engineers gaining successful progression.

    • Reason For Leaving

  • Wanting to reprise my role as a technical leader & line manager.

    • Skills

      Leadership
      Software Architecture
      C# / .Net
      Azure
      Node.js
      React
      Angular
      Nest.js
      Next.js
      TypeORM
      jest
      cypress
      JavaScript
      Typescript
      Koa
      Express
      Fastify
      MySql
      MariaDb
      SQL Server
      Postgres
      Git
      Jira
      Confulence
      SCRUM
      Agile
      Career Coaching
      Technical Presentation

    KeyedIn Solutions

    Technical Lead

    Bradford, West Yorkshire

    Apr 2016 - Oct 2019

    Responsibilities

  • Work as a technical expert on the flagship product.
  • Line manage a team of engineers.
  • Be responsible for team quality.
  • Recruit engineers.
  • Guide and develop junior engineers.
  • Hands-on delivery of product features.

    • Key Achievements

  • Delivery of new functionality such as 'Portfolio Management', 'Capacity planning' and 'Hybrid Resource Management', resulting in a more feature-rich software, attracting new clients globally.
  • Implemented a new framework for unit testing that was adopted company-wide, resulting in earlier detection of defects and an uplift in overall quality throughout new feature development.
  • Hired five junior & mid-level engineers and managed their progress, resulting in a larger engineering team with engineers able to deliver quality.

    • Reason For Leaving

  • I wanted to show my diversity as a software engineer and not get typecast as only working in .Net.

    • Skills

      Leadership
      Software Architecture
      C# / .Net
      Azure
      MVC
      Razor
      Typescript
      NUnit
      cypress
      SQL Server
      Git
      TFS (Team foundation service)
      Jira

    Northgate Public Services

    (Now NEC Software)

    Technical Lead

    Ossett, West Yorkshire

    Jul 2009 - Apr 2016

    Responsibilities

  • Hands-on engineer on the company's flagship resource management product aimed at UK police forces.
  • Recruitment and interviewing of candidates.

    • Key Achievements

  • Delivery of key features such as 'Event Planning', 'Personnel Management', 'Rules Engine Rebuild' and 'Time Banks' resulting in a better user experience and making resource management easier and more cost-effective.
  • Migration of technology from 32bit to 64bit architecture, allowing software to access more resources per server, reducing the number of servers required and saving police forces expenditure in servers to support the application.
  • Performance improvements of the main application, such as improving a 36-hour automated job, to ruin instead in 20 minutes, allowing more flexibility to the users in terms of when to generate and re-generate data.
  • Introduced automated unit tests, improving the quality of new feature development and a faster response to found issues.
  • Rebuilt architecture from a monolithic VB.Net application to an SOA C# platform, providing a decoupled system that utilised less system resources, and providing flexibility for alternative front ends.
  • Design of large-scale Oracle database partitioning and archiving solution, vastly improving the performance of queries against the large database holding rostering information, resulting in less time spent managing rosters.
  • Oversight of eight offshore engineers, ensuring that the approaches and direction are consistent, in addition to reviewing quality, resulting in a low number of new defects.

    • Reason For Leaving

  • After 7 years in this role, I wanted to move on to another challenge.

    • Skills

      Technical Leadership
      Software Architecture
      C#
      VB.Net
      ASP.Net
      MVC
      NUnit
      Javascript
      Oracle
      SQL Server
      Subversion
      Apache
      Microsoft Visual Source Safe
      Team Foundation Service
      Database Administration
      Network Administration