Tech Lead at Songkick (2020-01 – Present)
Songkick is a live music discovery platform owned by Warner Music Group, serving 600k MAUs on a Ruby on Rails/React stack hosted on GCP.
- Partnered with product, design and commercial leads on technical feasibility, design documentation and estimation
- Organised and allocated work across engineering teams of 3–15, producing fully resourced sprint and project plans
- Mentored engineers, providing hands-on support throughout projects and reviewing code
- Led incident responses through diagnosis, resolution and RCAs
- Technical delivery - independantly owning code from design to release
- Designed, led and was the primary contributor to an email verification system which saw a near elimination of spam accounts being created — an historic issue for the platform.
- Improved p95 latency of a core event-creation endpoint by 70%. Diagnosed the inefficiencies using rack-mini-profiler, Grafana and application logs, then implemented and shipped the fix, backed by RSpec regression coverage — resulting in a near elimination of timeouts on the endpoint.
- Led and delivered a feature allowing users to request shows for artists in a specific location, giving artist teams a valuable planning datapoint. Delivered touchpoints on the main website and the artist widget, resulting in ~35k show requests per month, a 2% increase in signups and an 8% increase in artist-management platform engagement.
- Maintained Pub/Sub-based background job processing at scale — designing queue and subscriber architecture and deploying daemons to offload asynchronous workloads from core application flows.
- Built an end-to-end AI-powered customer support agent during an internal hack week — designed the technical architecture and implemented the triage and automated Jira ticket creation, then organised the wider engineering team into delivery squads to extend it. The tool progressed from prototype to daily production use.
- Identified and mitigated a critical issue where unpermitted users could create fake events for high-profile artists, resulting in thousands of incorrect emails being sent. Diagnosed and verified a session-hijack vulnerability, implemented a fix, and led the RCA and stakeholder communication.
- Led the response to a thread-safety issue in an automated Spotify artist-import process that was mixing up user IDs. Diagnosed and fixed the root cause while running a large-scale import reversal and backfill to correctly match users to artists.
- Led, managed and resourced a tight 3-month all-hands project to overhaul artist services tooling, including a full redesign of an artist-management Rails frontend and a new React widget for artist websites — resulting in a 20% increase in signups via the widget and a 13% increase in actively managed artists.
Head of Web App Development at Purr Digital (2018-01 – 2020-12)
- Led a team of 3 developers across multiple client projects, taking responsibility for budgeting, scoping, task allocation and client communication throughout the delivery lifecycle.
Software Developer at Purr Digital (2015-01 – 2018-12)
Full-stack developer delivering client projects across Rails APIs, React SPAs and mobile-backed applications, frequently as the sole developer end-to-end.
- Delivered a book-ahead airport food delivery service trialled in Denmark, spanning an Ionic mobile app, Rails API, POS system and admin interface. Led the 3-person dev team and served as primary client contact.
- Architected the MVP for an online building materials marketplace — the company has since raised 3 rounds of funding and become a major industry player. Owned the database and backend, managed one other engineer, and led client sprint planning.
