
Web applications team manager at US Auto Parts
London, United Kingdom

Web applications team manager at US Auto Parts
London, United Kingdom
Systems and Solutions Architect, specialising in on-line and off-line publishing systems, especialy database driven content.
Search Engines, p2p Publishing networks, Postscript rips, newspaper and classifieds publishing tools, graphics rendering engines.
(Online Media industry)
January 2009 — Present (1 year 1 month)
Working to bring up an innovative vertical social network aimed at youth sports, responsible for platforms, architecture and scaleability. Also locating, hiring and managing a team of engineers to execute on the vision.
(Public Company; Automotive industry)
2009 — Present (1 year )
(Media Production industry)
November 2008 — Present (1 year 3 months)
Contexrtured is a high-tech start-up operating in the advertising space, as Information Technical architect I am responsible for platforms, deployment and operational system design. We make extensive use of virtualised platforms and distributed processing using Hadoop.
Large scale PHP based Middleware systems, based on Zend Framework
(Public Company; 501-1000 employees; Automotive industry)
2009 — 2009 (less than a year)
(Internet industry)
June 2008 — November 2008 (6 months)
Responsible for technical management and development of the fav.or.it product, a unique Blog content aggregation system. Fav.or.it is a solaris hosted PHP application running under Zend Framework
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; YHOO; Internet industry)
October 2007 — February 2008 (5 months)
• In addition to Prime Solution Architects Role……
• Help to create strategies for building and hosting international yahoo properties.
• Support Engineering teams in International with migration to several new Yahoo internal standards.
• Evangelise the use of agile product development techniques to international engineering teams.
• Create Presentions on various topics at external events such as BarCamp, dConstruct and @media.
• Assist in the design of the next generation of Yahoo platforms by vetting and providing consultancy on i18n and l10n.
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; YHOO; Media Production industry)
June 2007 — October 2007 (5 months)
* Refocused role on Content management and content integrations/aggregation
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; YHOO; Online Media industry)
April 2006 — June 2007 (1 year 3 months)
• New role family in Yahoo, I am responsible for starting up and creating the Solution Architecture group within the shared services group supporting Yahoo International Engineering.
• Assisting internal groups to navigate and prepare documents that conform to the International process.
• Vetting projects top ensure compliance with product standards agreed during 3 monthly negotiations with the global architecture group.
• Provide consultancy and Presentations support to internal workshops aimed at providing product teams with insights into potential integrations between yahoo platforms.
• Design of content middleware services for broad adoption globally.
• Support of Yahoo EU’s Tech PR initiatives through creation of Yahoo “Hackday” events in conjunction with the BBC.
• Support the Patent generation process in EU.
• Assist EU teams in understanding global direction of Yahoo Products developed in other regions.
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; yhoo; Online Media industry)
September 2005 — April 2006 (8 months)
• Took on responsibility for all non-media related activities in EU engineering, Homepage, MyYahoo, Comms (messenger, mail), Search, Local search, Communities etc.
• Team expanded to 22 indirect, 5 directs.
• Responsible for all localisation of global products delivered in EU region.
• Responsible for identifying potential Products in yahoo international orgs, that could be re-factored to be delivered on a global scale.
• Responsible for assisting corp. dev in identifying potential 3rd party companies, that would make good candidates for acquisition. And assisting with due diligence.
• Responsible for all EU billing systems and security.
• Report directly to VP of engineering Europe.
(Public Company; Online Media industry)
December 2004 — September 2005 (10 months)
• Added responsibility for Communities and Communications products to existing role.
• Team expanded to 14.
• Responsible for identifying new team roles and hiring and training managers.
• Responsible for assisting in shaping new roles and functions in European engineering restructuring.
• Platform is Unix based, Apache, FreeBSD, PHP, MySQL, Oracle
(Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; YHOO; Online Media industry)
August 2003 — December 2004 (1 year 5 months)
• Responsible for technical provisioning of search on Yahoo portal in 6 European countries.
• Responsible for i18n and l10n provision of Search Services.
• Managing team of 7 engineers, 2 in UK, 3 in Germany, 2 in Bangalore
• Responsible for evaluating new search products for European suitability.
• Responsible for operation of Search Farms hosted in Europe and US.
• Responsible for metrics and reporting on European Search.
• Responsible for Disaster recovery and Business Continuity Planning.
• Responsible for revenue reporting.
• Report to VP Engineering, and Search Business Unit MD.
• Platform is Unix based, Apache, FreeBSD, PHP, Custom Template Language
(Online Media industry)
2001 — 2003 (2 years )
• Responsible for design of a migration strategy for Loot.com to a 3rd party delivery platform.
• Integration with Windows DNA 2000 based application and external 3rd party content management system (Media Surface).
• Evaluation of .NET architecture for suitable platform for Loot.com service.
• Assisted in migration of Loot Publishing systems to Media Planner/CCI
(Public Company; 201-500 employees; Information Services industry)
1999 — 2002 (3 years )
• Responsible for planning and managing the merger of systems between LOOT.com and Scoot UK Ltd when company was acquired, re-architected web applications hosted by Scoot to conform to Loot Ltd standards, and supervised their re-implementation, re-launched service in June 2001. Designed complete geographically distributed hosting architecture and software system that minimised any risk of down-time. Extensive use of Replication on 9 x SQL server data repository.
• Responsible for designing content architectures and structures to allow syndication of Loot/Scoot content base to other companies, as well as being able to aggregate content from other suppliers.
(Privately Held; 201-500 employees; Online Media industry)
1991 — 1999 (8 years )
• Designed and implemented LOOT.com, at the time, the UK's most trafficked classifieds site, which won many awards, including the Lotus Work the web award, and the Professional Publishing Association awards. Completed design and implementation of both the software running on the site, plus the complete hosting system, loot.com was hosted completely in-house, Responsible for set-up of DNS, Web farm, load balancing systems, database systems, monitoring and alerting, SMTP mail systems and complete staging facilities. Wrote the search engine used on the site.
• Loot.com takes about 30-35 million hits (pages) per month. And about 0.5 million unique users.
• Application circa 120,000 lines of C++, 80 Main Classes.
• Skills: Visual C++, SQL server 6.5 + 7.0. NT 4 and win2k (beta program), XML, ISAPI.
• Managed a team of 3 Development engineers and 2 Operations/Service engineers.
(Online Media industry)
1989 — 1991 (2 years )
• Design and implementation of Loot's internal pagination system Eagle. Eagle is a unique windows based application that uses an object orientated database system (OODBMS)
• Skills: Borland C++, POET OODBMS, Oracle, SQL server, NT (on first beta program).
• A PC based Postscript raster imaging system, optimised for large format colour page output and high quality magazine formats. (Zortech C++)
• A DOS based newspaper pagination system with advanced "live" connectivity to advertising feeds. Distributed design allowed additional workstations to be added to increase overall processing power of the advertising cluster.
• System was used extensively in Milan by Italian publishing group “Secondamano”. Spent 1 year on site supervising installation and roll-out.
• A Postscript page imposition system used by the Office of Official Publications of the European Union to prepare plates for reports of proceedings in the European parliament. (Borland C++)
(Online Media industry)
1983 — 1989 (6 years )
• Responsible for providing sales group with technical backup and "prototypes" of custom software solutions and content management systems. Pagitek was a leader in the production of book pagination systems and journalist entry system for newspapers.
• Responsible for evaluating customer requirements and generating proposals and designs to suit.
• Responsible for auditing/vetting proposals generated by the Marketing/Sales group to ensure accuracy and suitability for implementation.
• Designed and Implemented "Edition" a Macintosh based Quark xPress extension designed to automate layout of pages using page layout imported from external page planning package. (CodeWarrior)
(Public Company; 201-500 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)
June 1980 — June 1985 (5 years 1 month)
(Online Media industry)
1976 — 1981 (5 years )
Radar, Solid state Electronics 1974 — 1977
1968 — 1974
Technical Architecture, Media, Video, audio, Content distrubution and managment. Deployment technologies, cloud computing.
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