Andrew is available for hire
Hire AndrewAndrew Duck
Verified Expert in Engineering
Strategy Developer
Location
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Toptal Member Since
January 23, 2020
A seasoned CTO, Andrew has over 18 years of experience founding, growing, and exiting startups and major companies. Working across government, media, hospitality, and blockchain-related industries, he has secured partnerships with the world's largest companies and driven over $100 million growth. Andrew has architected, launched, and grown platforms to support hundreds of millions of users globally.
Portfolio
GiggedIn
Node.js, React, React Native, MySQL, PHP
Undisclosed Startup
MySQL, WebSockets, Redis, PHP, Vue
Aversafe
Vue, MySQL, CockroachDB, RabbitMQ, Redis, React Native, Go, Hyperledger Fabric...
Experience
Availability
Part-time
Preferred Environment
Kubernetes, Docker, CentOS, RHEL, PhpStorm, Atom
The most amazing...
...project I've developed is the largest distributor of media in the world—serving hundreds of millions of customers across 206 countries.
Work Experience
Board Member, Advisor to CEO and CTO
2018 - PRESENT
GiggedIn
- Advised the CEO on hiring a remote team, conducting interviews, onboarding, and managing team responsibilities.
- Provided advice to the CTO on technology changes to support the addition of a new website and mobile application to support the business.
- Gave advice to the CTO on scaling existing infrastructure to support peak traffic following significant media exposure of a recent funding round.
- Joined the board of directors to support continued business growth, strategy, product, and technical direction.
Technologies: Node.js, React, React Native, MySQL, PHP
CTO
2018 - PRESENT
Undisclosed Startup
- Architected a fintech-based secondary markets platform to allow a peer-to-peer exchange of futures contracts.
- Built and led a team to develop the platform and launch it into production.
- Handled vendor selection and technical engagements for partnerships and new business opportunities.
Technologies: MySQL, WebSockets, Redis, PHP, Vue
CEO and CTO
2017 - PRESENT
Aversafe
- Developed a decentralized attestation and verification network to prevent the forgery and counterfeiting of documents, licenses, and credentials.
- Architected and built attestation schemas on top of Hyperledger Fabric to provide immediate verifications for government and multinational entities across the network.
- Built and led the engineering, product, business, and operations teams necessary to launch the company.
- Partnered with leading international universities and governments on developing standards for interoperability and data protection across borders.
- Delivered a self-sovereign identity management solution bundled into mobile applications for end-users to manage and share their documents, licenses, and credentials.
- Implemented embeddable widgets for employers to access shared network data from within their existing HR tools with minimal integration effort.
Technologies: Vue, MySQL, CockroachDB, RabbitMQ, Redis, React Native, Go, Hyperledger Fabric, Node.js, PHP
CTO
2014 - 2017
Zinio
- Increased product lines from two to ten over three years, leading to new B2B and B2C revenue opportunities.
- Replatformed the underlying technology stack that had previously powered the company for the previous ten years to improve responsiveness, decrease the page load and API response times, and simplify partner interactions with the business.
- Developed and launched an app automation platform to deliver thousands of in-market iOS, Android, and Windows mobile and tablet applications for the world's leading publishers.
- Architected and launched a digital version of the New York Times International Weekly partnered with the world's leading national newspapers.
- Delivered content syndication APIs for Amazon and Relay, providing content for their respective marketplaces.
- Handled thousands of servers and computed instances across AWS EC2, VMWare and colocated hardware (RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu, Alpine, and Windows).
- Architected and delivered an analytics platform for mobile devices in Go to capture 100s of millions of data points a day.
Technologies: MongoDB, Redshift, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Redis, Ruby, C++, Java, Kotlin, Swift, Symfony, PHP
Founder, MD and CTO
2011 - 2014
Audience Media
- Organized and led a team of over 70 to build the world's first multi-channel editorial management system to streamline editorial and publishing operations in print and digital for magazine and newspaper publishers.
- Architected an Adobe InDesign plugin to simplify designing magazines and the content flow from the Audience Media platform into InDesign.
- Developed a flat-planning tool to lay out and plan magazine and newspaper layouts visually.
- Architected and launched an automated application development platform to launch branded iOS and Android applications for publishers.
- Implemented a distributed content model allowing assets to be housed within geographic regions relevant to the publisher, speeding up response times, and improving customer satisfaction.
- Led product management, design, engineering, quality assurance, operations, HR, and project departments as the company grew from one to over 70 employees.
- Built and developed a Go-based image and video asset management system that automatically transcoded, subtitled, and resized assets for consumer web and mobile devices.
- Constructed a distributed, highly available network infrastructure for global media distribution across multiple data centers and AZs using VPNs and VPCs.
- Architected and developed Adobe InDesign/InCopy plugins for MacOSX and Windows.
Technologies: MongoDB, Python, Ruby, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), MySQL, Java, Objective-C, Go, Redis, PHP
Founder and CTO
2008 - 2014
Quiqcorp
- Architected and oversaw the development of the Japanese Wall Street Journal.
- Provided training and consulting services for eZ Publish-related installations for the entire southern hemisphere and Asia.
- Partnered with a leading provider of education and curriculum development services to deliver technology direction and development for the Ministries of Education and Health for the New Zealand government.
- Developed online booking systems for hotel chains in conjunction with Micros POS systems for global hotel chains, including the Hilton, Hyatt, and Intercontinental.
- Deployed and customized SugarCRM and vTiger for enterprise clients in the US/UK.
Technologies: SAML, iOS, Python, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby, PHP, eZ Publish
Experience
Aversafe
http://www.aversafe.comA document issuance and verification network to reduce instances of the document, license, and credential fraud. As the CTO, I built the team, architected the solution, and led development to deliver a platform used by universities, governments, and multinational companies to protect against fraud.
Zinio
http://www.zinio.comThe largest eCommerce and media distribution platform globally serving the magazine and newspaper industry. I was the CTO of Zinio and responsible for all engineering efforts across web, tablet, mobile, and syndication of content to third parties.
Audience Media
This is the world's first multi-channel editorial management system. I was the founder, MD, and CTO of Audience Media. I led the hiring of 100 engineers to build the platform that underpinned content editing for clients, including The New York Times, Elle, Cosmopolitan, National Geographic, and Oprah, among hundreds of others.
Wall Street Journal Japan
https://jp.wsj.comThis is the Japanese language edition of The Wall Street Journal. I was CTO and technical architect for the build of the JWSJ project in 2009, including back end, front end, mobile deployments, a wire translation system for translating content into languages and sharing them between bureaus, and a stock alerting system leveraging Dow Jones stock assets.
Skills
Languages
PHP, Go, Swift, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, SAML, Objective-C, Java, Kotlin, C++
Frameworks
Laravel, Symfony, Django, Ruby on Rails (RoR), React Native, Ruby on Rails 4
Libraries/APIs
Stripe, jQuery, Node.js, Vue 2, Vue, React
Tools
Jira, SugarCRM, VPN, Git, Atom, PhpStorm, RabbitMQ
Paradigms
Agile, DevOps, REST, Management
Platforms
Amazon Web Services (AWS), iOS, Linux, Hyperledger, Hyperledger Fabric, Android, Apache Kafka, Kubernetes, Blockchain, CentOS, Docker
Storage
MySQL, Redis, Memcached, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, CockroachDB, Realm, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Microsoft SQL Server, Redshift
Industry Expertise
Cybersecurity
Other
Freelancing, CTO, CEO, eZ Publish, Consulting, Funding Strategy, Strategy, APIs, Scalability, Content Delivery Networks (CDN), Advisory, Mentorship & Coaching, Leadership, Cloud Security, Fintech, Team Mentoring, Consul, IT Networking, High Availability Disaster Recovery (HADR), RHEL, WebSockets