Luke Wilson
Verified Expert in Engineering
Scrum Master and Software Developer
Athens, Central Athens, Greece
Toptal member since March 24, 2020
Luke wrote his first "Hello, World!" program in QBasic at the age of eight and has been coding ever since. With 13 years of professional experience as an engineering manager, scrum master, and architect, he started his career writing trading systems in .NET before broadening his experience in the London startup scene. He then held various leadership and technical roles in the Toptal core team (working with Rails and Node.js) before moving on to remote tech lead and engineering management roles.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
Neo4j, PostgreSQL, C#, .NET Core, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Redis, Linux
The most amazing...
...experience I've had was using natural language processing to parse classical music titles (e.g., Symphony #3 in C minor) into their component parts.
Work Experience
Technical Product Owner
BaxEnergy
- Delivered the proof of concept for an REMS system that automatically configured and managed power plants.
- Delivered the product roadmap for the beta version.
- Supported the development team as technical lead and engineering manager before we could hire for these positions.
Lead Engineer
Intelligent Hack srls
- Produced a project proposal, estimations, and costings for the client.
- Led the development team to deliver the first two milestones of an engineering configuration/simulation system.
- Worked as a product owner and technical lead to translate fairly complex and mathematical client specs into a backlog of stories for the team.
Graph Database Engineer
Terran One, Inc.
- Delivered a graph database of blockchain transactions, allowing the company (a blockchain development studio) to perform more advanced analytics.
- Managed the development team, introducing Agile and development best practices, including Scrum, proper UX and design workflows, and release workflows.
- Line-managed developers, working with them to set objectives and develop professionally.
- Helped design the hiring process and interviewed and hired developers.
- Worked on a number of projects, including an interactive blockchain simulator and a scripting language for Cosmos-based smart contracts.
API Developer (Node.js and JavaScript)
Pfizer - Manufacturing Operations Solutions
- Led the team delivering the COVID-19 vaccine rollout analytics dashboard, introducing agile and software best practices to the team, including production monitoring for a global pharmaceutical company.
- Mentored a permanent team leader to take over the team after me.
- Delivered a prototype for integrating multiple analytics dashboards into a common framework.
Engineering Manager
IntelligentHack
- Managed two globe-spanning engineering teams (from Brazil to Sri Lanka) developing greenfield projects, overseeing the successful go-live of one of the projects, and helping support the other in production.
- Coached both teams in Scrum, getting them to complete sprints with regular, incremental releases.
- Helped address serious technical debt on one of the projects, and turned the team around so they started to deliver good quality code.
- Identified and promoted team leads for each team, training and supporting them. This allowed me to step back from the day-to-day running of the teams.
- Promoted to the exec team, allowing me to help with more strategic issues such as sales and marketing.
Lead Developer and Consultant
Westbury Music Consultants
- Scoped out the prototype for a system to import artist discographies and store them in a Neo4j graph database for Westbury, a music company that represents some of the biggest names in the music industry.
- Built an MVP for a system to identify unclaimed artist income.
- Contributed to the MVP still in use; the client told me it has significantly streamlined his workflow.
Team Lead
Rezolve
- Took over a project with no documentation, nobody at the company working on it, and serious technical debt. Documented the architecture and principal workflows, fixed the highest-priority technical debt, and got it ready for release.
- Introduced Scrum to the company; collaborated with the team leads and product managers to get teams working in sprints and taking ownership of quality and testing; and helped the product team develop a product roadmap.
- Led the team in developing a technical roadmap to address the technical debt.
Software Engineer | Consultant
Caerus
- Built an MVP of an e-learning platform for a Mexican university, integrating with the Google GSuite platform.
- Built the site from scratch and delivered it within two weeks.
- Coordinated with the client to develop product requirements and technical and database designs and demoed the site to key university stakeholders.
Team Lead
CleverTech
- Led a team that delivered a greenfield project to help a major US corporation become compliant with a new California data privacy law.
- Built a preference management system that syncs the visitors' preferences across multiple devices and sites and integrates with services such as Segment.io to manage analytics and data tracking on each device.
- Built the product backlog, handled interactions with the client, oversaw the product's technical quality, built the team's culture, and line-managed the developers.
- Drove our QA process, winning my team round to a pragmatic, automation-driven approach, focusing on performance and realistic, concurrent test scenarios.
Back-end Developer | Team Lead | Scrum Master
Toptal
- Took over the team responsible for general technical improvements to the main platform and managed the team's transition to focus on building tools used by the sales and recruitment teams.
- Developed a communication system for the sales and recruitment teams, supporting VOIP and video calls, to provide essential analytics correlating call activity with a large amount of business KPIs.
- Built a team that has a good relationship with the business stakeholders while still being product-led.
- Worked as a scrum master on a team responsible for the developer experience of our large engineering team, building integrations between the various services (Slack, GitHub, Sentry error-reporting, YouTrack).
Head of Technology
Propoly Online Ltd
- Rescued a struggling project with an over-specified MVP, no investors, and most of the team gone.
- Learned the product, tech stack, and codebase and managed the remaining developer (whose motivation had been severely impacted by the turmoil at the company).
- Succeeded in delivering the site and signed up our first landlords.
Senior Engineer
Quantone Music
- Got a fairly junior team working together, introducing scrum and agile development, continuous integration and continuous delivery, and code reviews to developers who had never worked with them.
- Built a website to showcase the company's music metadata to potential investors.
- Built a parser to process classical music titles and broke them up into their components.
Software Engineer
Trayport Ltd
- Integrated the bug-tracking system (Bugzilla) with the agile project management system (Rally).
- Built an Excel plugin that subscribed to market data feeds and automatically updated spreadsheets for analysis.
- Worked on various trading systems, writing concurrent, real-time, and low-latency code.
Experience
Propoly | An Online Lettings Platform
https://www.propoly.com/Tanagra.js | A Simple, Lightweight Node.js Serialization Library
http://tanagrajs.net/Music Metadata API
Education
Bachelor of Science Degree in Physics and Computer Science
University of Leeds - Leeds, United Kingdom
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Node.js, React.js, REST API, Entity Framework, Apache Lucene, Segment.io, Python
Tools
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Ansible, Jenkins, Travis CI, Silverlight, Bugzilla, Rally, Excel Development, Google Workspace
Languages
C#, .NET, JavaScript, TypeScript, SQL, Scala, Python, HTML, CSS, Java, Rust
Frameworks
.NET, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, Web Development, .NET Core, Express.js, ASP.NET, ASP.NET Core MVC, ASP.NET Core 2, Angular, AngularJS
Paradigms
Agile Development, Web Architecture, Microservices Architecture, Microservices Development, DevOps
Storage
SQL Server, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Neo4j, Elasticsearch, Redis, Graph Databases
Platforms
Cloud Engineering, AWS, Amazon EC2, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Azure Design, Web Development, Blockchain, AWS IoT, Backendless
Other
Web MVC, Architecture, Software Architecture, Solution Architecture, Code Architecture, Scrum Master Consulting, Leadership, Technical Leadership, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Web Development, Engineering Management, Full-stack, Full-stack, Message Queues, Cloud Architecture, English, Back-end Developers, Performance, WebSockets, Google Software, NLP, IIS, SQL Server 2015, APIs, Database, Machine Learning, Algorithms, Data Engineering, Crypto, Team Leadership, MVP Design, Open Source Development, Blockchain & Cryptocurrency, Smart Contract Development, Cosmos, Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), New Products, Terraform Cloud
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