About Me

I am a Software Engineer with more than 15 years of experience. I specialise in web development technologies in the eCommerce space, specifically in Backend and Platform engineering, using Ruby on Rails and running applications in the Cloud.

Over the last few years I have been leading a Platform Engineering team which has been responsible for Cloud and CDN infrastructure and building tools and frameworks to enable feature teams to develop, deploy and observe their applications in a fast, secure, and cost effective manner, evangelising DevOps practices across the whole engineering team, and ensuring the reliability and security of our Platform.

Experience #

Principal Platform Engineer at Bloom & Wild #

October 2021 – Present

Played a key role in the newly formed Platform Team as Principal Platform Engineer, working closely with the Director of Platform Operations and the other members of the Tech Senior Leadership Team.

  • Help in the definition of the Platform Team roadmap.
  • Led a set of key initiatives, such as:
    • Designing and implementating a new Internal Developer Platform for the Engineering Team to build new services at Bloom & Wild.
    • Migrating from a single AWS account to an AWS Organisations set-up following well architected best practices, improving the overall security and maintainability of our Cloud Infrastructure.
    • Implementing a self serve framework for the Data Team to build, run and monitor their Machine Learning models.
    • Improving the CI and CD pipelines for the Engineering Team, enabling methodologies such as Trunk Based Development, in some cases increasing key productivity metrics such as lead time and deployment frequency dramatically.
  • Acting as the bridge between the Platform Team and the rest of the Engineering Team, as well as the wider business.
  • Raising the profile of the Tech Team internally and externally by writing technical blog posts and participating in Tech Talks and internal Workshops and Training.
  • Mentoring of engineers.
  • Participating actively in the hiring pipeline by interviewing candidates, drafting job specs and helping shape the team.

Lead Platform Developer at Bloom & Wild #

April 2020 – September 2021

Working alongside the Feature Teams, as well as the CTO and VP of Engineering, I was responsible for looking after all aspects of the Bloom & Wild Platform.

  • Managing our AWS account and all the workloads running on it.
    • Ensuring good security practices.
    • Identifying areas of improvement, suggesting and implementing new solutions based on AWS services and products.
    • Analysing costs and identifying areas where savings could be made.
    • Performance analysis and testing to ensure the platform was in a good shape for peak traffic and load.
  • Platform and application observability.
    • Ensure all our infrastructure and our applications had observability in place, and help developers understand how their applications were performing in the production environment.
    • Help developers identify areas of their application with poor performance and suggest improvements to ensure scalability wasn’t impacted.
  • Platform Team inception: working alongside the CTO, a new Platform Team was created in the business. I helped with the hiring of the first members of the team, and led the team and its function until a Head of Platform Operations was hired.

Principal Developer at Bloom & Wild #

July 2018 – March 2020

Principal Developer at Bloom & Wild, Europe’s leading online florist.

  • Providing guidance to the Tech Team and driving forward the Tech Roadmap working closely with the VP of Engineering and other senior stakeholders of the business, focusing on code quality, architecture, stability and scalability, given the seasonality of the business and its constant quick growth.
  • Recruitment, onboarding, upskilling and mentoring of developers.
  • Continuous improvement of the several processes governing the function of the Tech Team.
  • During my time as Principal Developer we delivered, among others:
    • Put together a Tech Roadmap for the year ahead, and help making sure its items get the right priorities in the team’s backlogs.
    • Successfully support the company through really busy peak periods by making sure work on improving the performance and reliability of the site is done, as well as ensuring any new feature is built with peak periods in mind.
    • Put in place a new process to do security auditions of our platform, as well as fixing any issues found in those auditions.
    • Extracted an operationally critical system from the monolithic application into its own service to ensure it can scale well during peaks, making use of serverless technologies.
    • Kick off and actively take part in the development of critical business features, for example Strong Customer Authentication and a bespoke web analytics tool using serverless technologies.
    • Greatly improve the observability of the platform to ensure the team is aware of how the platform is performing and how to also retroactively investigate any issues.
    • Migrate the main application to AWS Fargate, greatly improving the ability and ease of scaling the infrastructure.
    • Help raise the awareness of our Tech Team by speaking at meetups and writing posts on the technical blog.

Technical Lead at notonthehighstreet #

December 2015 – July 2018

Technical Lead of the Payments and Checkout team of notonthehighstreet.com, a leading eCommerce platform connecting thousands of small UK businesses and customers.

  • Ensure the team worked in business delivering stories by working closely with the Product Owner and stakeholders while also maintaining the technical quality standards of the technical solutions and their execution.
  • Recruitment, onboarding, upskilling and mentoring of developers.
  • Contributions to the overall architectural and technical direction of the business in collaboration with the rest of the Technical Leadership Team. This included setting up the guidelines, patterns and principles of a microservices architecture in the business (CI/CD pipelines, service discovery, reliability, failure modes, ease of debugging, message broker technologies, …).
  • During my time leading Payments and Checkout,the team delivered, among others:
    • PayPal Express Shortcut and Apple Pay integrations,dramatically increasing conversion rate.
    • Product favourites lists for our customers,increasing sales from returning customers.
    • A bespoke A/B testing framework to replace a high cost third party integration, saving operational costs considerably.
    • An IP geolocation service to increase the conversion rate of our international customers.

Ruby Developer at notonthehighstreet #

October 2014 – November 2015

Ruby Developer on the Payments and Checkout team of notonthehighstreet.com, a leading eCommerce platform connecting thousands of small UK businesses and customers.

  • Work with other developers in the team to deliver features in our area.
  • Coaching junior developers through pair programming and code reviews.
  • Help with the implementation of new patterns and ways of working while introducing new backend programming languages in the business (Java).
  • During my time as a Ruby Developer,the team delivered key objectives such as:
    • Migration to a new payment provider via a new Payments microservice, which reduced payment error rates and reduced payment fees.
    • Integration of PayPal Express Mark as a new payment method, reducing the dropoff checkout rate.
    • Partner tooling for finances in the German version of the website, enabling notonthehighstreet.com partners to manage their finances with the organisation.
    • Introduction of RabbitMQ as a new message broking technology (later on migrated to a managed SNS/SQS provider), which proved a critical step into decoupling parts of the system and disintegrating bits of the monolithic application into their own standalone services.

Ruby Developer at ArenaFlowers #

July 2012 – September 2014

Worked closely with the CTO developing new features for the ArenaFlowers.com sites. ArenaFlowers are an online florist with websites selling in the UK, Europe and the US. I was part of a small team of full stack developers. The technology used was Rails 2 and 3, with some background processing being done with Sidekiq, and MySQL as our data store.

  • Migrated the platform from Rails 2 to Rails 3.
  • Migrated the platform from Rackspace to AWS to reduce costs and take advantage of AWS cloud services, improving site reliability, scalability and easing deployments.
  • Ensured infrastructure stayed up during busy peak periods.
  • Vast improvements on the test coverage of the codebase and setting in place proper monitoring and error reporting tools, which greatly increased the confidence in releasing new features to production.
  • Introduced CI, CD and TDD practices to the technical team,increasing productivity and allowing for features to be shipped without manual developer intervention.

Ruby Developer at gnuine #

February 2011 – June 2012

Gnuine was a small web agency in Barcelona. This is where I started using Rails professionally. Started as a developer building websites for a variety of clients like newspapers, TV stations, football clubs, professional guilds, etc. At the end of my position I was leading a small team of 2 developers and doing some project management duties, including planning and communicating with the clients.

Previous Experience #

2007 – 2011

Worked for a variety of companies using technologies like ASP.net, C#, Delphi, Java and C++, developing websites but also desktop and server applications.