Work

Software Developer & Engineering Leader

A thoughtful technical leader with over 10 years experience building successful software, with a focus on nonprofits and companies that make the world a better place. I thrive in a passionate collaborative team, driven by users needs and with freedom to make things better.

Want to hire me? [email protected]
Download PDF: Dev | Lead

Experience

Veho – Senior Staff Software Engineer

Jun 2024 - Present. Remote. Veho powers fast, transparent and personalized next-day delivery and returns for e-commerce companies so they can increase customer satisfaction and drive customer lifetime value.

  • Lead warehouse automation work, in collaboration with external vendors and internal operations partners
  • Guide supply chain systems towards more defined workflows, enabling more flexibility as Veho’s operations evolve
  • Contribute to the growth of other engineers, through mentoring and finding growth opportunities

Typescript, Serverless, DynamoDB, React, GraphQL, PostgreSQL.

Veho – Staff Software Engineer

Feb 2022 - Jun 2024. Remote.

  • Driving engineering wide technical direction towards de-coupled event-driven services, to enable faster iteration and greater stability
  • Migrated Veho’s client facing order API out of a failing monolith to a multi-region serverless replacement, without downtime or interruption to clients
  • Moved engineering towards trunk based deployments on all new services
  • Guided teams towards setting up actionable on-call alerts, reducing noise while improving response times
  • Designed a north star architecture for Veho’s supply chain systems to align teams and reduce churn on individual system designs
  • Worked with product and business stakeholders to meet data privacy requirements, allowing Veho to work with larger more established clients
  • Built tooling to accelerate engineering teams shipping new features and services Contributed to open source tools to enable faster internal development

Typescript, Serverless, DynamoDB, React, GraphQL, CDK, AWS.

Veho – Senior Software Engineer

2021 - Feb 2022. Remote.

  • Led migration of customer data from a legacy monolith to enable launching a consumer mobile app with > 90k monthly active users, handling > 70% of reroutes (previously entirely manual support)
  • Implemented auth and SSO for internal applications using Amazon Cognito
  • Designed and built Veho’s first warehouse automation backend

Typescript, Serverless, DynamoDB, React, GraphQL.

Private Chef Club – Lead Developer

2019 - 2021. Remote. Private Chef Club is a food delivery startup, serving homestyle meals for families.

  • Designed, architected and built the initial SMS and web apps.
  • Automated delivery and support tasks to reduce manual errors and preparation time.
  • Built GraphQL/React app to launch local food-maker marketplace.
  • Directed product roadmap to enable growth based user testing and feedback.
  • Implemented a minimal continuous delivery pipeline for fast, high quality releases, with increased visibility.
  • Managed software development team to ensure quality code and on-time delivery.

Python, PostgreSQL, Javascript, React, GraphQL, Svelte, Redis, Celery, Heroku.

Ushahidi – CTO

2015 - 2018. Remote.
Ushahidi is an open-source crowdsourcing platform to collect, manage, visualize, and respond to data from marginalized people or people in crisis situations.

  • Led and mentored a distributed development team, building an open, collaborative and engaged culture.
  • Grew the dev team from 5 to 10 developers spread across 6 countries.
  • Moved the dev team to a sustainable agile dev process. Resulting in shorter, more predictable time to release, closer integration with product and design, and a more stable product.
  • Led migration from a legacy software stack and infrastructure to modern replacements. Resulting in faster, more stable development, and reduced infrastructure costs.
  • Created a long term plan to iteratively reduce technical debt, improve architecture and tooling while continuing to deliver value to product teams.

PHP, Laravel, Kohana, Javascript, React, AngularJS, Python, MySQL, RabbitMQ, Ansible, Terraform.

Ushahidi – Senior Developer

2012 - 2015. Remote.
I joined Ushahidi in 2012 to lead development of client projects. In 2014 I led development of a new iteration of Ushahidi software.

  • Led the rebuild of Ushahidi’s open-source crowdsourcing tool.
  • Launched SaaS edition of Ushahidi based on our open-source product.
  • Technical contact and lead developer on client projects.
  • Working within and improving an existing legacy code base over time.
  • Deployed, managed and monitored infrastructure for client projects.

PHP, Laravel, Kohana, Javascript, AngularJS, Python, MySQL, RabbitMQ, Ansible.

Torchbox Ltd – Drupal Web Developer

2010 - 2011. Oxford, UK.
Torchbox is a digital agency building websites and application for people trying to make the world a better place.

  • Developed complex Drupal based sites for charities and nonprofits.
  • Scaling and optimising complex Drupal sites through a combination of static caching (with varnish and nginx) and improved app level caching.
  • Building tools for fast, standardised development and deployment.

PHP, Drupal, Javascript, Python, MySQL, Sass, HTML, CSS.

Greenpeace New Zealand – Web Developer

2009 - 2010. Auckland, NZ.
Joined Greenpeace NZ in 2009 as their first full time developer, initially focussed on supporting a large online campaign around climate change.

  • Developed multiple web applications and websites.
  • Managing websites and social media feeds during high traffic live events.
  • Deployed and optimized online fundraising tools for increased donations.
  • Security testing and fixes on legacy web apps.

PHP, Drupal, Silverstripe, Javascript, HTML, CSS, MySQL, PostgreSQL

Engineers Without Borders NZ – Web manager (Volunteer)

2008 - 2010. Auckland, NZ.

Freelance - Web Developer

2002 - 2009. NZ.
Worked as a freelance web developer part time while studying and then full time for a year. Developed a range of websites and applications for small businesses.

PHP, Silverstripe, Javascript, HTML + CSS.

Genesis Interactive – Web Developer

Summer 2007 - 2008. Auckland, NZ.

Navman – Software Testing Engineer

Summer 2006 - 2007. Auckland, NZ.

Education

University of Auckland. Bachelor of Engineering (Computer Systems).
Graduated 2009.

Side projects