John Field’s CV

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John Field BSc MSc

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/JohnFieldUK

Location: Walthamstow, London E17

Technical leader, veteran engineer, and agile architect. **Seeking further challenges and growth opportunities in tech for good / social impact space, including CivicTech, GovTech, EdTech and ClimateTech.

Over 20 years expertise in technical, organisational, and soft skills; multiple lead roles in cross-functional teams; coaching and mentoring; agile evangelism; architecture and design.

Comfortable with a variety of hands-on, hands-off, on/off site approaches. Self-directed, self-disciplined, lifelong learner, with interest in emerging organisational practice, including Modern Agile, distributed governance and co-operatives.

Summary

Lead Engineer, Senior Software Engineer Apolitical (July 2019 - Jan 2021)

Technical leadership role, building Engineering team, culture, processes, in a GovTech product-driven startup of 35, building the first global learning platform for government.

Build out Engineering team, culture, processes, while migrating away from legacy WordPress system to modern services architecture
Node, React, MySQL, Postgres, Sequelize, Auth0, Google Cloud Platform (GCP, GKE), Kubernetes, Gitlab CI / CD, Helm, Terraform, some Python (data science, including semantic tech), PHP (heavily customised WordPress), some elasticsearch, some Rust
Leadership: vision, hiring, culture setting, day-to-day mentoring, defining, evangelising, and evolving processes; requirements / design / delivery of new or replacement platform features / components and features; hiring, agile practices, documentation, risk management, etc.
Personal growth in fast-paced early-stage startup

Senior Software Engineer, BBC Studios / BBC Worldwide (July 2017 - May 2019)

Consumer Digital Technology department within the commercial / global arm of the BBC.

Building **BBC Studios Sale*s global content showcase of BBC programmes / formats for international licensing*

Microservices: Symfony, Silex, PHP, modern Javascript, Node, JSON API, Express, React, Elasticsearch, GraphQL, MySQL, Postgres, Docker
Mixed-role team of up to 10: Kanban, DevOps, JIRA, CI / CD (Jenkins), Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, Splunk

Learning Platform Lead, AVADO (Mar 2017 - June 2017)

Team / Tech Lead, agile coach / practitioner for a heavily customised Moodle (PHP) codebase running on legacy WISP stack with Microsoft ecosystem integrations

Understand and stabilise legacy platform; document codebase, processes, etc.
Build and lead a cross-functional to transition from legacy stack to cloud environment in context of cost reduction
Establish Modern Agile practices to increase quality, reduce risk, foster learning culture; project discovery, establish sprints, iterative culture, working with stakeholders ,etc.

Senior Software Architect, Alexander Street (Jan 2012 - Jan 2017)

Strategic / managerial role for digital humanities publisher. Acquired by ProQuest in June 2016.

Senior technical leadership with managerial elements
Define, communicate and evangelise architecture, design, delivery, and maintenance of platforms, tools, processes, projects, etc. to support and promote business goals
Envision, ideation, and delivery of product and technology strategy, concepts, and roadmaps
Promote good practice and group ownership in development processes, system quality and knowledge, testing and related QA guidelines, component integration, etc.
Define, promote and revise project delivery guidelines (specs, workflows, testing guidelines, documentation, etc.)
Strategic analysis to pivot/adjust strategy and tactical activities
Communication / mentoring of strategy / tactics to team members
Oversee and mentor Architect and Engineer roles
Combine with Tech Lead / Team Lead duties as required

Key Achievements

Main deliverable: “LAZR” - https://search.alexanderstreet.com content discovery / delivery / consumption platform - tech stack includes Solr 5.x, Symfony 2.x, Drupal 7.x, JavaScript media players, Agile practices, and a chunk of backend legacy / CRM / content-pipeline code. Delivered in an iterative manner since 2013
Architect related work in parallel to the Team / Tech Lead position
As with there, much of this stuff relates to numerous internal projects. Ask me! ﭢ

Tech Lead and Team Lead, Alexander Street (January 2014 - Jan 2017)

Tech (Engineer) Lead

Lead day-to-day technical delivery of multiple projects
Lead in project feasibility study, breakdown, specification, technical approach, analysis and design, estimation, etc.
Ownership of project processes (sprint planning, effort estimates, commitment, etc.), project artefacts (documentation, maintenance flows, etc.), quality activities (code review, automated functionality and performance testing, deployment processes, etc.)
Demonstrate technical leadership and evangelism
Provide visibility into a project (work progress, impediments, risks, etc.)
Liaise with Project Manager, senior technical, and other roles to ensure project delivery, quality metrics, etc. are met

Team (Project) Lead

Liaise with team members (including Project Manager and Tech Lead) for proactive task allocation and delivery
Encourage continuous improvement via retrospectives, kaizen, reducing technical debt, internal refactoring, etc.improving code quality
Mentor and grow team members

Key Achievements

Tech / Team Lead for the LAZR API - a very hands-on role
Evangelised and championed Agile adoption within the organisation
Lead for “Admin Portal” - Drupal 7- based CRM and customer self-service; support DDA / PDA / EBA business models, e-commerce, etc.
Lead for legacy product migration
Lead for numerous internal projects. Ask me! ﭢ

Information Architect, Alexander Street (September 2010 - December 2011)

Reporting to the CTO to provide technical implementation plans and tactical decision making for the development team in line with company strategic objectives.
Architecture; Prototyping; Mentoring; Coaching; Knowledge Transfer; Strategy Realisation; Technical Leadership; Agile Methodologies; Continuous Improvement

Senior Developer, Alexander Street (June 2006 - September 2010)

Critical role in development team for design, development, QA, deployment & maintenance of a bespoke publishing platform for over 20 text, print reference, graphical, audio, and video humanities and social science collections for use by thousands of institutions worldwide
Specification/feature breakdown, research & development; integration; deployment; maintenance; short term and long-term tasks and processes; work allocation & prioritisation; large-scale data-import & manipulation
Collaboration with Chief Technology Officer/CTO, Head of Development, global & local development teams, non-technical staff, QA staff, UI designers, and others in a virtual office; requiring high verbal and written communication skills
Large degree of initiative, self-motivation, and self-organisation for both independent and team-based work
Knowledge transfer/mentoring with other developers of components and architecture
System, server, and database administration & support
Evangelising agile processes adoption, including Scrum & Kanban, over legacy waterfall/ad hoc model; expose and improve process issues
Evangelising social media adoption
Evangelising of ‘Do The Right Thing’ development techniques to codebase/company development practices, e.g. ActiveRecord, code/content separation, dogfooding, 80/20 rule, DRY, YAGNI, retrospectives, refactoring, late-binding optimization, recognition of technical debt, centralisation of documentation/issue tracking, code formatting & conventions
Effectively project lead for numerous product development/release projects

LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), object-oriented PHP 5, custom MVC platform, Zend Framework, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Prototype, script.aculo.us, Xapian, Eclipse, Subversion, Linux (Ubuntu), TRAC, XML, Firebug, OOP Platform design, domain & DNS configuration, dOxygen, PHPDoc, Skype, Basecamp, Scrum, Kanban

Details of below omitted for brevity; available on request.

Developer, Portsmouth Business School (Feb 2005 - June 2006)

MSc. Internet Systems Development, University of Portsmouth (2003-2004)

Implementer, The Innovation Group (2000-2003)

I.T. Lecturer & Course Manager, School Of Computing, Highbury College (1997-2000)

BSc. (Hon) Applied Physics, University of Portsmouth (1992-1996)

Wallingford School, Wallingford (1985-1992)

GSCEs & A-Levels, including Maths, Physics, Biology