Curriculum Vitae

My first project at Comic Relief was designing and implementing a new data repository solution for our complex needs, resilient to the spike of traffic that we need to sustain, especially during TV shows. The new data pipeline successfully ingested the high traffic of Red Nose Day without errors or fatigue.

I was also responsible for designing and implementing Comic Relief's new Prize Platform backend, a collection of microservices integrating with our existing donation platform, feeding immutable data into our pipelines. The platform deployed on February 2, 2021 and has been processing prize entries requests since.

As a test-driven development enthusiast, I worked on the testing strategy for our services, focusing on simplifying E2E workflows spanning several headless applications. In particular, email testing and contractual testing have been automated, providing a high level of confidence into our deployments.

All services at Comic Relief are able to scale infinitely without delays, and with a high degree of robustness, covering the case of dependency failures. The systems were designed to stay operational in case of major failures of our service components or cloud provider components.

I joined the ZOOstudio team, NAB Product of the Year 2019. Given the complex requirements of our clients, we worked in a fast-paced environment with quick release cycles, adapting to the changes of the industry landscape.

While designing, implementing and monitoring features was still a big chunk of my daily routine, as a Senior Engineer I had the chance to mentor Junior and Middleweight Engineers, sharing with them the tricks of the trade and explaining the best practices and more importantly the reasons behind the best practices.

Following my work on ZOOdubs and then ZOOstudio, I led the development of a new product, specific to the needs of one of the biggest names in the media industry. With my team, I interpreted the requirements of our client, designed and proposed its implementation, and delivered with an extremely tight deadline, without sacrificing the quality of the software.

I was assigned to the ZOOdubs team. The multiple award winning product offers fast, reliable and localised voice acting to media-industry giants for their content.

In my role, I designed and developed several of its central features, including a user-facing REST API that simplified the original monolithic views, and the lip-sync timeline that had prohibitive performance requirements; I profiled the bottlenecks of the application, both the web UI and the backend server, optimising slow queries and ineffective data handling, while also refactoring the legacy code in safety. This included an interesting and fun Python2 to Python3 migration!

My primary concern was to provide thoughtfully tested, documented code respecting coding standards, without forgetting the most important Agile principle: to provide value to our clients at each release cycle.

I managed VPS and dedicated servers for our clients, an experience that gave me insight in the LAMP and LEMP stacks, and on how to manage *NIX environments. I built integrations with several APIs, such as TrustPilot and Microsoft Bing, that showed me how great APIs are structured. The biggest project I worked on was a Python service that would serve the original applications’ contents in different languages.