With over 6 years of industry experience in software engineering, and even more years as an avid coder, I’ve had the opportunity to lead and grow large scale engineering teams in high pressure environments. My objective is to pursue and continue this career path to face new challenges and improve my leadership capabilities.
Responsible for the teams who support the Billing & Payment platform.
Managing 5 development teams, responsible for the whole of the Argos In-Store, including the main bank tills, digital catalogue & payment terminals, Click & Collect colleague tooling and more. Also I looked over the future shopping experience SmartShop Pick & Go till-less journey that was successfully launched and trialled in Holborn Circus.
Accountable for the In-Store capex/opex budget, rolling out new hardware for the Argos & Sainsbury’s stores as well as responsible for people costs, spanning engineering, testing, delivery, product, service and other colleagues to deliver on company initiatives.
Mentoring and coaching other engineering leaders to empower their teams, enabling them to take accountability of their technical strategy and engaging senior stakeholders on progress.
Lead 2 teams consisting of cross-functional software engineering and hardware specialists that focuses on innovating our in-store experience for Argos customers. I was responsible for working with the team to build a Tech Strategy and Roadmap, collaborating with Product to manage our stakeholders, and keeping stable service throughout all our stores. Furthermore, I looked over the Opex and Capex expenditure for our production and non-production environments, managing Cloud specialists within my engineering team.
I ran a variety of sessions with the team when I joined, focusing on how to mitigate a previously planned large scale roll-out. Including the use of matrices identifying impact and complexity, bringing in an Agile Coach to help facilitate conversation and drive outcomes.
Also, I enabled the team to deliver on Argos’ first Nectar Loyalty integration on time, designed a weekly project Service Review’s utilising tooling such as ServiceNow and collaborating with 3rd party suppliers to combine a single view of Service across Argos In-Store in the UK and ROI.
Lead 3 cross-functional agile engineering teams, working on Sainsbury’s Group in-store proposition SmartShop, scaling the solution from 2 stores to over 525 stores with £1bn in revenue per month. Within almost 3 years of leadership of engineering, I took responsibility of line management, introducing modern ways of working within the engineering team, including pair programming, TDD and efficient CI / CD pipelines.
I lead on introducing and delivering modern MDM solutions for over 20,000 in-store devices across the UK in Sainsbury’s stores, using AirWatch/Workspace ONE MDM and automating deployments using a “Focus Stores / Non-Focus Stores” strategy that allowed us to safely deploy in weekly cycles and gaining qualitative feedback from our customers and colleagues faster.
Furthermore, I coached and mentored engineers using weekly / bi-weekly one-to-one’s, setting up personal development plans and running frequent performance discussions to give clear feedback for their development. Recruiting talent using a technical, diverse and inclusive interview process, almost tripling the team size of engineering throughout.
Lead 2 cross-functional agile engineering teams, running in an XP workflow for an under 60-minute delivery service application across London. We used lean principles to keep requirements to a minimum and ensured every change was fast, stable and offer an opportunity to learn from our customers via analytics, A/B testing and ML models.
As a mid-level entry back-end PHP developer, I worked on a variety of languages that I self-taught including Python, Java and frameworks including Angular and Vue.js. Furthermore, I introduced the Lumen framework, pairing with the front-end engineer using Vue.js, to build a single page application within weeks that quickly met customer needs.
Developed a variety of internal business web systems, involved in end-to-end development of each feature in a small-scale Scrum team format. As an innovation piece I implemented a centralized auditing database for all transactions between a combination of 3rd party and in- house systems within the company.
