Leading teams that build solutions to help merchants present their products to their customers through Shopify's software as a service offerings.

Manage and lead a team of volunteers as they brought a hosted, clustered PHP/Ember/AJAX/jQuery/jQuery Mobile web based product to market running on Linux after extracting it from the work done at Carrubbers Christian Centre. Product Management to identify key features, implementation, market analysis, product positioning, pricing strategy and definition.

I led and managed multiple teams (skip level management) that own part of Amazon's business and was involved in every aspect of the process from idea generation, prioritization and goal setting, business analysis, product and technical design, through to software development and 24/7 maintenance.

Projects:

• Amazon's Inherent Relationships team maintains relationships between items in the retail catalogue; for example connecting paperbacks to kindle editions, contributors to works, substitutes for grocery items, newer versions of an item, or connecting digital video content from different streaming providers. Our work is like matching grains of sand on a beach; we use machine learning (deep learning) to automate the process of identifying candidate relationships, and facilitate quality control and training using a custom auditing platform I invented which seeks to optimize the impact auditors can have per audit-hour.

• Amazon's Global Talent Acquisition team builds automated systems to source talent for each of the (as of 2017) 18,000+ open vacancies spread across the company's world wide sites. The systems involve natural language processing, machine learning, clustered computing, big data, AWS and surface functionality through web applications and APIs.

• Amazon's Dynamic Advertising program delivers highly personalized but anonymized advertising via real-time auction serving millions of ad impressions every day. It is backed by a globally distributed massive scale software system trained using machine learning, scientific analysis and rigorous A/B testing.

• Amazon Storyteller, part of Amazon Studios, was an online, collaborative motion picture development project, where people from anywhere could turn scripts into test movies and where customer feedback informs development decisions. Amazon Studios is combining technical innovation with the vast reach of the internet to redefine how commercial movies will be developed in the future.

Registers of Scotland is the Government Department responsible for compiling and maintaining registers relating to property and other legal documents in Scotland.

Responsibilities:

Lead the Solution Working Group as they assist in capturing and defining the requirements, and turning those into a technical solution with phased delivery. Document and communicate that Service Orientated Architecture solution to non-technical audiences and multiple implementation teams; some in house; some external. Work with the implementation teams to task and order the work. Progress working patterns towards an agile software delivery process to improve the value, flow and quality of changes. Create and then maintain a documentation repository of the 60 systems spanning 40 years of technology ranging from Perl/Informix through Java/Oracle to Python/MongoDB.

Projects:

• Land Registration etc. (Scotland) Act 2012

• Land and Buildings Transaction Tax (Scotland) Act 2013

Founded in 1995, Rockliffe is a privately owned company that builds communication software products for service providers, enterprises and consumers.

Responsibilities:

Manage Architecture of 1.5 million lines of multithreaded, clustered, scalable, server code. Web applications written in C# and Javascript using .NET, AJAX and Webservices with other protocol servers and backend written in C++, managed C++, C and SQL. Project definition, requirements capture, architecture, design, estimation, implementation strategy (Agile/Kanban), QA strategy, project management, QA management, process management, feedback management and final tier technical support. Management of a distributed team of 9 across 4 sites, and recruiting and mentoring engineers.

Architecture and design for:

• ASP.NET AJAX web email client. Delay-loading, web services, data synchronization

• Calendar and Contact Server with web/mobile/desktop interfaces, including contact/calendar sharing and meeting requests

• Message store, layered on top of NTFS, including push technology for changes and Sqlite caches

• XMPP Server integration, including tunnelling custom ListSync protocol to provide push mail capability to XMPP clients.

• Integration with 5 external Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus products

• Database and file store optimizations for accessing TB of user data

Invent and implement:

• ListSync protocol; generic bi-directional item sync for web, mobile and desktop clients with JSON and XML transport bindings

• Tracing capability to permit live tracing of instrumented code, split by active user

• Contributions to several internet standards, including iCalendar

Leadership:

• Analyse and drive change to development processes, including introduction of Agile

• Instigation and delivery of code review and unit testing

• Invent, design and part implement .NET quality assurance management tool

• Upgrade architecture and migrate many modules from C to C++

• Introduce Script# for writing Javascript using C#