tom@tomstuart.co.uk
Summary
Software developer, technical leader, people manager, conference speaker, cyclist, runner.
Career at-a-glance
Employment history
BCG Digital Ventures - Engineering Lead and Software Excellence Coach
- Served as interim CTO for OpenSC, overseeing its expansion to a Berlin office and establishing its technical foundations.
- Defined the team structure for OpenSC, hired the incoming Head of Engineering, and served as a technical advisor during the handover.
- Worked as the sole engineer to tight timelines on a variety of projects in the entertainment, real estate, agricultural, and healthcare sectors, defining and validating startup businesses. Presented findings to C-level representatives of our clients and secured the go-ahead to proceed to the build phase for a number of projects.
- Conceived, built, and delivered a training programme for emerging engineering leaders at BCGDV. This has now been delivered to 30+ engineers in three different locations worldwide, with positive feedback from all sides.
- Served as a line manager and professional coach to my team members on projects, to six people across the organization in a more stable assignment, and informally, by request.
- Conceived and developed a practical workshop on trunk-based development which has been delivered to the entire engineering department in Berlin.
- Collaborated with BCG colleagues in a more traditional consulting environment to assist in an agile transformation project for a major financial client.
Movinga - Vice President, Software Engineering
- In a short span of time, expanded the engineering organization from 8 to 16 developers, while improving its gender ratio from 7:1 men/non-men to 11:5.
- Put team leads and a two-tier reporting structure in place to facilitate this expansion, and further expansion in the future.
- Developed a framework for aiding in the career progression and assessment of developers, along with a peer and manager feedback process to support it.
- Kicked off and occasionally contributed to an effort to simplify infrastructure and bring it under Terraform control, leading to a 50% reduction in hosting costs.
- Along with the Head of Product, developed a process for high-level planning which brought business stakeholders and the technology organization into closer alignment and led to faster iteration.
- Oversaw the integration of various technologies acquired from our erstwhile competitor, Move24.
SoundCloud - Tech Lead
- Proposed and helped implement changes to the emergency on-call system for engineers, leading to a 50% cost saving and increased job satisfaction from engineers.
- Convened and moderated the tech leadership forum - a process and regular meeting for escalating cross-cutting technical issues or opportunities, and scheduling work in those areas.
- Produced architectural guidance for microservice authors.
- Produced and delivered a workshop on the topic of workflow improvement. Suggested concrete improvements to SoundCloud's product development process and coached PMs to implement them.
SoundCloud - Developer
- Implemented sign-in with Google
- Developed the API and made tweaks to the client for a new creator-focussed mobile app, "Pulse".
- Planned and executed online schema changes for large database tables to ensure continuity of service.
- Developed, published, and evangelized internal guidelines for determining the production readiness of microservices.
Forward Internet Group - Developer
- Worked on a small team to develop car insurance comparison journey with industry-leading UX in short time.
- Migrated several personal finance applications from legacy .NET stack to Ruby- and Javacript-based systems.
- Devised and tested various new business ideas following Lean Startup practices.
- Organized Vim workshop with an external expert.
Jobsgopublic - Developer and Systems Administrator
- Introduced behaviour-driven development supported by Cucumber
- Replaced a proprietary gem management solution with Bundler
- Led the project to upgrade the company's main application to Rails version 2.3
- Maintained the company's infrastructure with Chef and migrated key servers to Amazon EC2
Alliantist - Developer
- Introduced the use of Cucumber for automated acceptance testing to the team
- Implemented scripts for importing performance indicator data in bulk from legacy spreadsheets in use at a major Probation Trust
- Migrated version control from Subversion to Git
FDM Group - Technical Trainer & Trainee Developer
- Devised and delivered workshops on shell scripting, object-oriented programming and SQL
- Delivered commercial training to recently-placed consultants working with clients including the RSPCA
- Led the training operation in the newly-created Manchester office
- Created a web application with Spring for tracking trainee progress
Education
BA - Classics - 2:1 (University of Oxford, 2007)
Other things to know about me
I'm a keen runner and cyclist. Things I'm proud of here include my 10k time (39:11), my half marathon time (1:27:29), and my Marmotte finishing standard (Gold). If none of that means anything to you, that's OK. I promise not to talk about it too much.