Joseph EarlOpen to work
I'm open to new opportunities.
Values
Through 13 years of professional experience in software delivery and leadership roles, I have found that good software is delivered through close customer collaboration and a happy workforce. Guided by the Lean and Agile philosophies, I continuously seek opportunities to learn and improve. My respect for people fosters an environment that fuels innovation, collaboration, and growth. I believe the ability to respond quickly to customer demands through clean, easily maintainable code and practices like DevOps and continuous deployment is the key to business success.
Experience
Principal Software Engineer @ Motability Operations
— Present
Leveraging Generative AI and Machine Learning to improve CX and drive efficiencies in customer support. Managing the technical delivery of and the team responsible for the Motability Scheme online account (React, micro frontends, Node.js, Java, Spring Boot, Quarkus) to over 700,000 customers.
- Reduced call centre call wrap times by using AI to automatically summarise and categorise call notes
- Introduced a process for managing vulnerabilities to the team, reducing the MTTR by 85% to <7 days
- Improved monitoring and alerting for the team, reducing the number of alerts developers need to respond to each day by 80%
- Set quarterly technical OKRs for the team, resulting in the modernisation of all frontend applications to React 18 and backend applications to Java 17 and latest Spring Boot/Quarkus major versions
- Established an InnerSource programme for sharing code internally across Motability Operations, increasing the number of libraries created and shared
Principal Technical Consultant @ Waracle
—
Providing technical strategy and advice to some of the UK's most pioneering clean tech startups and largest financial services and energy providers.
- Developed project proposals for clients, winning over £2M in new work
- Created and shared white papers on technical topics such as GitOps, Developer Portals and Compliance as Code, building brand awareness
Lead Technical Consultant @ Thoughtworks
—
Leading teams to deliver large scale technology modernisation, capability development and digital product development for some of UK's leading brands.
- Incrementally replaced a legacy monolithic B2B financial web application with a modern microservices (Java, Kotlin, Spring Boot, Kubernetes) and micro frontend (React, Node.js) architecture, reducing the time for key business processes from days to minutes
- Introduced continuous delivery practices to a leading grocery chain, increasing deployment frequency from once a month to multiple times a day
Chief Technology Officer @ Lenio
—
Leading the technology function of an early stage FinTech startup to build out the technology capability and efficiently deliver cross-platform application prototypes (React, Ionic, Node.js) for further investment.
Head of Mobile @ Powa Technologies
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Managing multiple native mobile teams (iOS, Objective-C, Swift, Android, Java, Windows Phone, C#) to deliver innovative omni-channel retail experiences and mobile payment solutions.
Lead Android Developer @ BirdGuides
—
Developing a native Android application for bird enthusiasts.
Skills
Management & Leadership
- People first
- 121s
- Coaching & mentoring
- Wellbeing & culture
- Performance reviews
- Interviews
- DevEx
- Lean management
- OKRs
- Engineering management
- Lean product management
- Team modelling & financial forecasting
- Job requirements
- Technical leadership
- Technical strategy
- Solution selection
- Presentations
Practices & Techniques
- Customer focused
- Product engineering
- Customer support
- Incidents, On call
- Analytics, Metrics, KPIs
- Shifting left
- TDD, TBD, Pair programming
- DevSecOps, FinOps
- Separation of deployment & release, Feature toggles
- Testing in production
- Continuous delivery
- CI/CD
- Continuous deployments
- Infrastructure as code
- Compliance as code
- GitOps
- Agile
- Inception, Discovery, Planning, Retrospectives, Standups
- Event storming
- Lightweight threat modelling
Technology
- Generalist
- Java, TypeScript, C#, Kotlin, Swift, Scala, Bash, Willing to learn
- Full stack
- Backend: Spring, Quarkus, Express, ASP.NET Core
- Responsive Web: React, Next.js, Astro
- Mobile: iOS, Android
- Evolutionary architecture
- DDD, Micro services, Micro frontends, Mobile micro features, Serverless, Messaging, Stream processing
- ADRs
- Cloud platforms
- AWS, Kubernetes, OpenShift, Docker, Lambda
- Operations
- Production deployments
- Monitoring & alerting
- Blameless post-mortems
- Operational excellence
Books that have influenced my thinking
Radical Candor, Managing for Happiness, Leaders Eat Last, Superteams, Lean Enterprise, Accelerate, Project to Product, Team Topologies, The Phoenix Project, The Goal, QED
Education
MSci Theoretical Physics @ Imperial College London
—
Studying the universe and gravity with computational methods (C++, MATLAB).