Head of Software Engineering

Initially employed to deliver a single project, I ended my employment as Head Of Software Engineering after having supported the company’s rapid growth by building a fully remote software team to a peak of 15 frontend and backend devs and contractors and leading the team to successfully deliver a number of key projects as well as maintaining my skill as a web developer.

I joined a national ISP at the start of a period of major investment and was fortunate to have the opportunity to develop my own leadership skills managing a number of key projects as the business grew.

In addition to building and leading the software team I was interim lead of the Saleforce environment during a major expansion of this platform and as the business grew I was a key resource in developing the processes and systems which introduced the Change Approval Board and the Technical Design Board across the business, on which I sat as the Tech representative.

Software development

Amongst other projects, I was responsible for the architecture and development of MissionControl, a bespoke solution for detecting, tracking and reporting of network outages, used by customer support teams and network engineers and as the single source of truth for public-facing status updates.

Some other projects include:

◾ A bespoke order journey to allow customers to order broadband and related products based on their postcode and service availability, with integrations with Salesforce and ZohoCRM.

◾ Migrated legacy website to the StatamicCMS platform with ongoing maintenance and development, and worked closely with Sales, Marketing, and Customer Experience to support their sales and marketing strategy to improve customer acquisition and retention.

◾ Maintenance of acquired companies’ own systems while those systems and customers were migrated onto core.

People leadership

With VC investment^* flooding the business, I was responsible for building and managing the software team as it grew from myself as the sole developer to a total of 15 PAYE and contractors. I built the team with a mix between frontend and backend devs, with experience ranging from junior to senior developers and specialist contractors.

This was a fantastic opportunity to build a team from the ground up, along with the responsibility of instilling the development ethos and dedicating time to the team’s CPD and mentoring the junior devs. I set up a monthly forum for the entire team to cross train in other developers’ particular areas of expertise and held regular 1-2-1 sessions to ensure effective communications channels. I allowed one day per sprint for developers to work on technologies of interest to them, but with an eye to commercial adoption or deployment.

Project management

I was responsible for the entire software development lifecycle and spent much of my time working alongside PMO PMs to triage development requests from across the business to plan resource and commit to project deliverables, and to respond flexibly to frequently changing business priorities.

Multiple concurrent projects were scheduled and tracked in MS Project to satisfy business requirements across a wide range of technology areas, from web development and maintenance of legacy and acquired systems and applications, to maintaining and supporting a large dataset of Qgis geospatial and demographic data and developing custom Python plugins to support strategic planning of future network build areas.

Major projects delivered

◾Working closely with external data scientists and Head of Strategy to build and maintain an extensive library of demographic data to identify opportunities for network build areas.

◾ Introduced Jira as a critical component in triaging and tracking the progress of development requests, from initial user request through to project delivery. The success of my use of Jira within the software team resulted in its wider adoption throughout the business, and as global Jira admin I set up multiple project boards across a number of departments, customised to their specific requirements and workflow, and led user training sessions across many teams.

◾ Developed and maintained the MissionControl software used internally to track service outages, with integrations with Salesforce, external providers, the public-facing service status system, and customers’ CPE equipment.

◾ Maintained a large AWS estate providing critical services to our customers, and migrated a number of EC2 instances from manual configuration to IaC using Terraform and Ansible and set the devops processes and policies applied throughout the business.

◾ Led the team that developed ground-breaking network planning software to automate much of the manual processes of network installation planning and adherence to architectural and regulatory standards.

◾ Set up and managed multiple Jira boards to support the introduction of the company-wide Change Approval Board and Technical Design Board to ensure that all proposed changes to any system are fully documented and meet CAB approval based on TDB-agreed designs before being scheduled.

◾ Established the processes, workflows and systems required to support OfCom’s introduction of One Touch Switching.

_{*VC investment later dried up through poor sales performance, resulting in sweeping cuts throughout the business including most of my team, and myself.}