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Luke Wilson, Engineering Management Developer in London, United Kingdom
Luke Wilson

Engineering Management Developer in London, United Kingdom

Member since February 13, 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.
Luke is now available for hire
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Portfolio

Experience

Location

London, United Kingdom

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Node.js, Neo4j, PostgreSQL, C#, .NET Core, 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.

Employment

  • Engineering Manager

    2021 - PRESENT
    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.
    Technologies: ASP.NET Core, Redis, Azure, SQL Server 2015, Scrum Master, Engineering Management

  • Lead Developer and Consultant

    2020 - 2020
    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.
    Technologies: Neo4j, .NET Core

  • Team Lead

    2020 - 2020
    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.
    Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Linux, .NET Core, Web Architecture, ASP.NET Web API, Agile, C#.NET, .NET, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, AngularJS, C#, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Core

  • Software Engineer | Consultant

    2020 - 2020
    Caerus (via Toptal)
    • 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, technical and database designs, and demoed the site to key university stakeholders.
    Technologies: Linux, JavaScript, Express.js, Web Architecture, Agile, G Suite, PostgreSQL, React, Node.js

  • Team Lead

    2019 - 2020
    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, which 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 technical quality of the product, built the culture of the team, 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.
    Technologies: Linux, JavaScript, Web Architecture, Agile, Segment.io, Google, React, Express.js, Node.js

  • Back-end Developer | Team Lead | Scrum Master

    2017 - 2019
    Toptal
    • Took over the team responsible for general technical improvements to the main platform, and managed the transition of the team 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).
    Technologies: Linux, PostgreSQL, JavaScript, Express.js, Web Architecture, Agile, Kubernetes, Docker, Travis CI, Jenkins, Ansible, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Ruby on Rails (RoR), Node.js

  • Head of Technology

    2016 - 2017
    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.
    Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Linux, AWS, JavaScript, Agile, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Docker, PostgreSQL, Ruby on Rails (RoR)

  • Senior Engineer

    2014 - 2016
    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.
    Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS, JavaScript, Agile, .NET, C#.NET, ASP.NET MVC, Natural Language Processing (NLP), NLTK, Python, Scala, Neo4j, ASP.NET Web API

  • Software Engineer

    2011 - 2014
    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.
    Technologies: Linux, JavaScript, ASP.NET Web API, C#.NET, .NET, Microsoft Excel, Rally, Bugzilla, Silverlight, IIS, ASP.NET MVC

Experience

  • Propoly, an Online Lettings Platform
    https://www.propoly.com/

    As the head of technology, I was responsible for all technical aspects of the product, as well as carrying out a large proportion of the development. This covered everything from front-end and back-end coding to testing and DevOps.

  • Tanagra.js, a Simple, Lightweight Node.js Serialization Library
    http://tanagrajs.net/

    An open-source library written and maintained by me. The Tanagra.js project aims to provide JavaScript developers with the ability to serialize complex, nested classes into a format that can be transmitted over a network or stored in a data store such as Redis. The deserialized objects contain all the data and functions of the original classes, allowing them to be used in code as the originals were. The library requires only standard JavaScript (currently tested with ES6 and node.js), with no dependency on experimental features, Babel transpiling or TypeScript.

  • Music Metadata API

    An API providing music metadata, covering popular and classical music. As a full-stack developer, I built a website to showcase the data to potential customers and investors, developed the algorithms to parse classical music titles into their component parts, designed and implemented the graph-based data-model to store the data, and extended the API to retrieve it.

  • Serializing Complex Objects in JavaScript (Publication)
    https://www.toptal.com/javascript/serializing-complex-objects-in-javascript
    The Tanagra.js library is designed to be simple and lightweight, and it currently supports Node.js and ES6 classes. The main implementation supports JSON, and an experimental version supports Google Protocol Buffers.

Skills

  • Languages

    C#, C#.NET, JavaScript, Scala, Python, HTML, CSS, Java

  • Frameworks

    .NET, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web API, .NET Core, Express.js, ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET Core MVC, ASP.NET Core 2, Silverlight, AngularJS

  • Libraries/APIs

    Node.js, Apache Lucene, Segment.io, NLTK, React

  • Paradigms

    Agile, Web Architecture

  • Other

    Web MVC, Architecture, Software Architecture, Code Architecture, Scrum Master, Leadership, Technical Leadership, Minimum Viable Products (MVP), Web Development, Engineering Management, Solution Architecture, Performance, AWS, Google, Natural Language Processing (NLP), IIS, SQL Server 2015

  • Storage

    PostgreSQL, Neo4j, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, Redis

  • Tools

    AWS EBS, Ansible, Jenkins, Travis CI, Bugzilla, Rally, Microsoft Excel, G Suite

  • Platforms

    AWS EC2, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Azure

Education

  • Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and Computer Science
    2005 - 2008
    University of Leeds - Leeds, United Kingdom

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