I am an experienced CTO, technical leader, software architect and engineer. I've worked in organisations as varied as multinationals to start-ups and led teams from 5 to 80 in size. I have a deep understanding of modern software engineering, architecture and languages which I use to steer strategy for organisations looking to use software as their differentiator.
I founded and am currently the CTO of a software consultancy, DevCycle. I have worked with organisations as varied as multinational banks to social media and finance start-ups. I take a holistic approach and use tactical approaches to deliver strategic gains. I believe that growing a business is predicated on scaling it's technology which is built on a sustainable approach to software development based on strong software and architectural principles. Getting the engineering practices right leads to a scalable engineering team, scalable software and sustainable growth.
Mar. 2015I worked at Obrizum as VP of Technology My role included but was not limited to, providing hands on support to the Head of Engineering on a range of key projects, delivering hands on support in ensuring scalability of platform infrastructure, providing advice on team structures and processes to enable greater efficiency, driving commercial outcomes through supporting the prioritisation of tasks, supporting the technical hiring activities, assisting with the implementation of technical & procedural measures to support information security management.
Jan. 2023I was CTO of Opencast Software, a software development consultancy based in Newcastle Upon Tyne. I was responsible for all software engineering both internal and in our clients. I developed software engineering practices, software architecture services, delivery methodologies and managed all the software development staff. At Opencast I worked with multinational companies, government departments, finance, insurance, online gaming companies amongst others. I acted as the senior consultant and delivered software development projects, digital/agile/lean transformations, cloud migrations and architecture reviews.
Nov. 2012I was the Practice Head of Java and Open Source Software for Capgemini FS UK. I was responsible for a team of up to 80 engineers working across dozens of clients. I developed technical strategy and services for CG to sell as well as delivering several digital transformation projects, architectural transformations, and individual software deliveries for many clients
Oct. 2007
As VP of Technology at Obrizum, I worked with the CTO, CPO and Principal Engineer to reorganise the engineers into two product stream teams, a complex subsystem team, and a cloud platform team. The cloud platform team was particularly key as it provides the foundation for the CTO function to move quickly and remain portable across regions while satisfying clients privacy concerns. I also advised the data science team on software engineering principles & architecture. I established a software engineering community of practice to promote good software hygene and worked with the CPO to develop communication channels to the business around maintenance and issue management.
I worked with ClashApp (now Huddles) to develop their social media platform by managing the migration of 4 million accounts from an acquired social media platform. I assisted in introducing new product management and engineering practices. I helped migrate their architecture to a more modular and event driven approach to allow better time to market and scalability. I also acted as an interim member of the Exec during one of the technical founders paternity leave.
I came into USwitch (R-VU) to back fill for a team that had recently left. I was responsible for maintaining and rearchitecting two data ingestion platforms for USwitch. During my time at USwitch I rearchitected the platforms to reduce complexity, simplify maintenance and changes and clarified context boundaries. In addition to adding new features/data, I added many new diagnostic tools for the commercial team & wrote 3 new microservices, decommissioned 5 services and rearchitected 6 services. The majority of these were written in Clojure/ClojureScript
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© 2023 Chris Howe-Jones
