Professional Experience

Elsevier Ltd, Oxford

Software Engineering Manager - Business Insights & Analytics

December 2022 - June 2024 (left rôle for career break)

In my most recent role at Elsevier, I managed a department of ~30 individuals within the company's Digital Business Systems division. Working with colleagues in multiple countries, including the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, India, the US, and China, my primary day-to-day focus included working across teams, departments and organisations to remove dependencies and deliver new products and updates to expectations. At the same time I strove to ensure my direct reports and their reports were well-supported and heard, applying coaching and mentoring techniques where appropriate.

Some other specific projects included:

• The design and delivery of distributed cloud-based software for GDPR compliance, implemented in Go, AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, and MSSQL
• The introduction and assessment of AI tools, such as GitHub's Copilot and JetBrains' Code-with-Me, for software development to establish benefits, pitfalls and best practice
• The coaching and mentoring of direct reports and other colleagues across the organisation with a specific focus on supporting the development of women working in technology rôles
• Supporting delivery of standardised data warehouse and data mart solutions built on Snowflake, Collibra, Airflow, Glue and Tableau
• Managing outsourcing to agencies based in the UK, Europe and India
• Working with the corporate architecture and security teams to ensure our solutions met appropriate standards, and were resilient and secure

Elsevier Ltd - Oxford and Amsterdam

Software Engineering Lead (Submission Systems)

November 2019 - December 2022 (promotion)

In my second rôle at Elsevier, I was the lead developer and architect for a number of distributed, event-driven AWS cloud solutions built using a variety of classic and serverless services using Go, JavaScript, Java and Python programming languages. Projects included web-based applications to aid authors, editors and reviewers as part of Elsevier's core publishing process. This was a key focus area for the company: to improve efficiency of the process and reduce the time to editorial decision, whilst at the same time providing a higher-level of engagement with and support for their authors and reviewers.

During this time I fostered close partnership with my product and user experience counterparts to develop and test ideas and deliver, define metrics for, and measure experiments.

It was a dynamic and exciting period that saw me bootstrapping of five distinct software engineering teams in rapidly changing environment, overseeing software development, coaching and mentoring new team members in Agile and Lean software development, as well as supporting and coaching product and business colleagues in Agile practices.

Examples of projects I worked on as tech lead in this rôle include:

• COVID-19 Notifier: during the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, it became important for Elsevier journals, such as The Lancet to identify submitted papers relevant to the global pandemic. In less than a month we responded to this need with an AI-backed tool that detected COVID-19-related submissions and brought them to the attention of editors across a variety of scientific journals
• Open Science Data Extractors: open science initiatives mean more transparency of the data and the people behind academic papers. We provided two Java Kubernetes services that collected and inserted key research datasets and CRedIT data into the paper publishing process.
• Track Your Submission: a single-page web application employing AWS services, such as Lambda, DynamoDB, SNS and SQS, and written in ReactJS and Go enabled authors to track the progress of their submissions through the peer-review process. This self-service solution saved the authors time in finding out their paper's status, and the company money fielding such customer queries.
• Check Your Submission: we tested a hypothesis that we could use AI tools to perform technical checks on submitted papers and speed up this process later down the pipeline in production. In order to get feedback as fast as possible we developed a single-page MVP that was production-architected, but with a focus on the bare-minimum of functionality. We were able to ascertain that such an offering did not show significant improvement neither in customer satisfaction nor cost savings for the company, and therefore were able to take the tool offline again and pivot to work on something else, minimising the amount of waste involved.

SSRN, Elsevier Ltd - Oxford, UK and Rochester, NY

Software Engineering Lead (SSRN)

April 2017 - November 2019 (promotion)

The Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) is a subdivision of Elsevier acquired by them in 2016. SSRN supports and promotes the open publishing of conference and preprint (aka working) academic papers, providing an important platform for collaboration and discussion between academics and scientists. At the time of acquisition of SSRN, day-to-day business operation were based out of upstate New York, with software development being done in Argentina and Brazil.

My major responsibility during my tenure was the in-housing of the existing legacy web-based SSRN application and its ongoing development. The incumbent development team was in Argentina, and I was able to use my language skills in Spanish and knowledge of South America to build a solid relationship with the outgoing team.

At the same time I was responsible for standing up a development team based in the UK. Due to the legacy aspects of the existing platform, which was built using ColdFusion and Java, backed by Oracle and MySQL, and the need to operate in a complex and relatively social environment, I recruited a broad-sweep of skills and experience to meet demand.

Ongoing day-to-day operations were involved with overseeing software delivery using Scrum both in the legacy code base, and through introducing software seams enabling us to build using more modern, REST-ful approaches with tools such as JavaScript, Python and ReactJS. In addition, my role included representing the development team in SSRN's quarterly planning meetings for setting of OKRs and metrics as well as mentoring and coaching of team members, and helping to steer our overall technical approach.

Trust Power Ltd, Oxford

Agile Coach

April 2016 - December 2017 (contract role)

• Coaching existing high-performing team on Agile software development
• Polyglot software development in Python, PHP, Java, Node.js, and Drupal

The Performance Window Group, Oxford

Head of IT

May 2011 - April 2016 (left rôle for career break)

• Supporting the TimberWindows, Mumford & Wood, Dale and Clearwood brands
• Setting, managing and reporting on departmental budgets
• Board-level contribution to critical business decision-making and product idea design, testing and implementation
• Definition and implementation of IT desktop and services policies
• Implementation of an Agile transformation programme
• Overseeing software delivery in Perl, Javascript, AngularJS, SQL
• Setting software engineering standards, actively participated in code reviews, development, and mentored defining development approach

People & Planet Ltd, Oxford

IT Officer

January 2009 - July 2010

• Coaching existing high-performing team on Agile software development
• Polyglot software development in Python, PHP, Java, Node.js, and Drupal

Psand Ltd, London, Barcelona, Coimbra and Bristol

Co-founder and CEO

January 1996 - December 2008

• Web services company specialising in websites for franchises and dealerships founded to promote free software, primarily Linux
• Clients included BMW, Alfa Romeo, ActionAid, Universal Records, British Diabetes Association, Imperial War Museum, Pinnacle Publishing, and HiPP Organic
• Software development in ColdFusion, Perl, Python, PHP, and Java based on Linux
• Software architecture and design
• Client relationship and account management

More on my tenure at Psand

BNP Paribas, London

Windows/NT Integration Analyst (Contract)

October 1997 - April 1998

• Definition of an application-packaging methodology and standard for large-scale deployment of Windows/NT across organisation
• Planning and delivery of a training program for engineers in the aforementioned standard
• Working in London and Paris across multiple teams in multiple languages

NatWest Insurance Services, Bristol

Windows/NT Desktop Support Specialist (Contract)

September 1996 - December 1996

• Day-to-day second-line support of Windows/NT desktop computers across 1,000-user organisation

Johnson Fry Property, Bath

Desktop Support Technician

February 1995 - August 1996

• General IT support for Windows and Novell systems
• Inception of desktop standardisation project
• Planning and execution of Windows 95 roll-out across the organisation

Unisys Ltd, Milton Keynes

BTOS/CTOS Support Technician

July 1991 - July 1992

• Day-to-day support of BTOS/CTOS operating system, applications, and hardware as part of industrial placement during degree course