Allister Smith

A web-based platform used by insurance companies to launch new digital insurance products into their business with minimal effort. The platform provided functionality for policy issuing, claims management, premium collection (credit card, debit order), policyholder communication (email, SMS, WhatsApp), and regulatory reporting. Customers had access to a documented public API for integrating products into their existing solutions, and a web-based dashboard to facilitate day-to-day operations.

I led a team of 5-10 engineers in architecting, implementing, managing, and scaling the platform from scratch, using mainly Node.js, Express.js, React, TypeScript, and PostgreSQL.

I also designed, implemented, and managed a highly-available, multi-tenant environment in AWS to host the platform. This included a CI/CD pipeline powered by GitHub Actions and Semaphore CI, and real-time error reporting to PagerDuty for on-call support. I used Terraform to script and provision the infrastructure.

During my four-year tenure, the platform scaled from having no customers to handling 10+ million policies across 15+ enterprise customers and serving over 500,000 API requests on a daily basis.

While working for Effcomm SA, I managed the implementation of a new web-based portfolio management solution for a large UK-based wealth management firm. The new solution replaced their legacy desktop application and was used by wealth managers to handle client portfolios, build investment models, submit trades to the market, and run performance reports.

I was responsible for gathering and documenting requirements from stakeholders, defining project timelines and milestones, facilitating progress meetings and reports, and providing training to impacted staff members. This included decommissioning the existing legacy solution.

I also developed the integration layer responsible for synchronizing client, portfolio, stock, transaction, and pricing data between the client's existing systems and the new solution. This integration was developed using PHP, MS SQL, and MySQL. By the end of the project, the integration synchronized millions of records daily.

The solution was successfully rolled out to over 100 offices across Europe within the expected timelines and budgets.

A managed service that monitors database health, making intelligent and actionable suggestions to improve product uptime and performance.

I am one of two co-founders, and I was tasked with designing, architecting, building, and deploying the application from scratch. I was in charge of developing the back-end API, customer-facing dashboard, and the open-source connector that customers run in their infrastructure to monitor their database instances securely. I also implemented a highly-available CI/CD pipeline and hosting environment for the service based on AWS CodePipeline and Amazon ECS.

We were invited to enter the project into Pioneer, a US-based startup accelerator program, in 2022.