Summary
An engineering leader whose passion is building high-performing technology teams. My expertise lies in software development, DevOps and platform engineering alongside coaching, mentoring and driving technical change within organizations.
Education and Qualifications
- Oracle Certified Associate Database Administrator
- BSc. McGill University, School of Computer Science, Montreal, 1999 - 2003
- MSc. Organizational Behavior, Birkbeck University, 2014 – 2017
- Certified Scrum Master
- Fluent in French, written and spoken
Employment History
GlaxoSmithKline (Pharmaceuticals, www.gsk.com) May 2020 – Present, London
Senior Director, Product & Capability Enablement (Core Tech)
Strategic Direction, Product Management, Vendor Management, Budget Management, People Leadership
- Leading the Product & Capability Enablement group in Enterprise Hosting Services. Our mandate is the automation of infrastructure provisioning and management at GSK. We integrate and orchestrate services such as compute, storage, networking and IDAM to create an internal platform providing self-service workflows. We do this across both cloud (Azure, AWS and GCP) and on-premise, including GSK datacentres, manufacturing centres and research sites across the world.
GlaxoSmithKline (Pharmaceuticals, www.gsk.com) Mar 2019 – May 2020, London
Senior Director, Cloud Hosting Services (Core Tech)
Technical Leadership, Cloud Engineering, Strategic Direction, People Leadership
After being recruited internally from Pharma Tech to Core Tech, now leading a cloud engineering team inside the Platforms group managing the GSK cloud environments in Azure and GCP.
From IDAM and networking to security, FinOps and container orchestration, our multi-disciplinary and cross-functional team provides the platform and governance framework needed for delivery teams inside GSK to make use of cloud capabilities.
GlaxoSmithKline (Pharmaceuticals, www.gsk.com) Nov 2018 – Mar 2019, London
Director, Platform Engineering (Pharma Tech)
Platform Engineering, People Leadership, Cloud Engineering, DevOps
- Tasked with building the internal cloud platform for a new product team in GSK. This includes recruiting and growing a team of platform engineers, integrating the new platform with existing ITSM systems, ensuring our innovative approaches comply with organizational standards and policies, and helping to introduce best practices and agile ways of working to existing teams in GSK.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SaaS, www.salesforce.com) Nov 2017 – Oct 2018, London
Director, Systems Engineering
DevOps, Strategic Direction, People Leadership, Cloud Engineering, DevOps, SRE
- Led the Platform Engineering team responsible for the underlying platform, environments and shared services used by Advertising Studio product engineers.
- Created and led the DevOps Guild to expand DevOps practices. The focus was on service reliability, capacity-planning, monitoring and alerting for team ownership of production services. Important themes were automated infrastructure, monitoring and scaling. I wrote a variety of tools to support developer productivity workflows from ideation to product shipping.
- Migrated in 9 months our DEV and QA environments from the Rackspace Public Cloud to the Google Cloud Platform, the first Salesforce property to do so.
- My team implemented and managed the first Google Kubernetes Engine environments for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, focusing on SecOps, compliance and cross-cloud collaboration.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SaaS, www.salesforce.com) Mar 2016 – Oct 2017, London
Principal Engineer, Systems Engineering
DevOps, Cloud Engineering, Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code, SRE, Technical Leadership
- Having moved from a management/product role to a more hands-on systems engineering role inside Salesforce, focused on helping the Advertising Products engineering team transition to a more DevOps approach to shipping software.
- Working with tools such as Terraform, Packer and Chef, designed and implemented processes and systems for automated provisioning and programmatic management of the team infrastructure.
- Gave workshops, talks and provided support to engineers to enable the teams to move to self-provisioning, monitoring and operational support of their entire product stack.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SaaS, www.salesforce.com) April 2013 – March 2016, London
Software Engineering Manager
Strategic Direction, People Leadership, Product Development
- Managed the product engineering team for Social.com supporting and extending our platform for social advertising through Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
- Working closely with the product team and the rest of the tech leadership, my focus was on continuous improvement of the team – both technical and through process changes - in order to deliver the functionality required by the business while growing a high-performing and motivated team.
- From an initial team of 2 people, recruited over half the developers working on the Advertising Studio product and put in place the initial organizational structures and developmental processes used by the current engineering team.
- Over the course of several years introduced practices such as continuous deployment, agile methodologies, advanced testing techniques, DevOps and innovative software architectures.
Rank Interactive (Gaming and Casinos, www.rank.com) September 2012 – April 2013, London
Technical Lead
Strategic Direction, Technical Leadership, Technical Architecture
- Responsible for setting the technical direction of the team, ensuring best practices are followed, architecting new products and evaluating the latest technologies for use among the various brand teams.
- Led a team of 4 remote developers implementing a greenfield integration project tying together disparate transactional systems to allow customers to transfer funds between their online and retail accounts.
Wiggle (Online E-Commerce, www.wiggle.co.uk), May 2012 – September 2012, London
Team Lead
Strategic Direction, Technical leadership, People Leadership, Product Management and Development
- As team lead, I was responsible for driving technical development inside the buying, merchandising and finance stream.
- With a team consisting of 4 software engineers and 1 QA tester, I was heavily involved in technical and product planning for the stream as well liaising regularly with other team leads and senior management to define strategic objectives.
Videojug (Online Video Industry, www.videojug.com) August 2011 – May 2012, London (Part-Time)
Senior Software Engineer
Product Development
- Participated in the complete rewrite of the site from an ASP.NET WebForms architecture to an ASP.NET MVC architecture, including designing and implementing an API for our Android and iOS mobile clients.
- Left in May 2012 as needed to go full-time again and could not do so at Videojug.
0-One (GIS Systems, www.0-one.net) January 2008 – May 2012 (Part-Time), London
Founder, Technical Director
Product Management & Development, Technical Leadership, People Leadership, Strategic Direction
- Responsible for online development and strategic planning for the award-winning business which employed over 10 people in several countries.
- Recruited, trained and mentored the development team and led the creation of our flagship GeoCMS product which allows management of spatial data as well as administering our geospatial database.
- Helped put together deals with Navteq, Orange CI and Navitel.