Stephen Newman

Principal Engineering Lead

Working closely with a team leveraging large language models as part of a lawyer productivity toolset to aid their adoption of GTP-3/4 technologies and migrate from a trial on-premises deployment model into Azure. Hitting the ground running by contributing to their codebase on day 3 identifying and fixing bugs, understanding the architecture of the platform and beginning to form a strategy of simplification to aid the onboarding of additional resource, and reducing the total cost of ownership of the platform. Managing stake holders and working with other parts of the IT community to address issues such as the hardening of containers, provisioning of suitable log output, and integrating with technologies such as Azure SignalR Service. The platform is formed of numerous microservices leveraging Blazor Server (with the Flux pattern), MongoDB, EventStoreDB, SignalR, Azure Cognitive Search, numerous large language models, including Harvey.ai.

Forming relationships across the Architecture, Data, and Engineering function to promote best practice in software engineering into the organisation. Focussing on building the simplest things that could possibly work, ensuring that the development teams have access to as fast a feedback loop as possible and encouraging technologists to prioritise good technology fit to business problems.

Principal Software Engineer

As a senior member of the Common Cloud Platform team working across both AWS and Azure cloud stacks. Migration of core usage tracking components from an AWS, Lambda, Node.js, DynamoDB stack to an Azure, C#, Durable Functions, Cosmos DB as part of the strategic move to a SaaS offering for our customers. Working with senior technologists to provide input into improvements that can be made as we look to the future.

Leveraging extensions to the OpenAPI Specification to allow services to describe their rate limiting characteristics and that output be baked into API Management during deployment time. Providing necessary tooling to ensure that analysis of current normal load is performed consistently and in an efficient a manner as possible. Enhancing the organisation’s compliance capability by designing and delivering a new trade compliance integration affecting our IdP (Auth0) with downstream affects into Angular and .net platforms. Working across the organisation to describe the foundations for the rewrite strategy for Authorization targeting a Kubernetes based hosted model.

Mentoring members of the team as they continue to grow in their software career, providing feedback via code review and giving presentations focussing on leveraging modern software engineering practices to deliver positive outcomes for customers. Delivered talks to the team and Chief Technologists related to Domain Driven Design (including Context Mapping), along with a presentation on Explainable Artificial Intelligence during AVEVA’s Developer Conference in Cambridge.

Software Architect

Working across various parts of the business and operating within many ecosystems. Working with a team of Java engineers on a graph database backed data platform I was able to help the team move the design and technical implementation of the product towards a trial rollout serving a division. Java 8, Neo4j.

Developing an example application to support the extension of the quotation platform to take advantage of Akka.net's Clustering and Sharding capabilities. Supporting the team in the design activities associated with the extension of a high throughput payment platform. Diagnosing production issues and providing timely tactical and robust long term solutions to the root cause discovered. C#, ASP.NET Core, Redis, PostgreSQL.

Support team members and the development community through one on one mentoring sessions and team wide presentations covering aspects such as architectural styles, async/await, domain driven design, and an overview of reactive frameworks within the JVM ecosystem.

Head of Development

Working with a small team to build a cloud native social network platform to allow content creators to connect with their supporters. Provided software engineering guidance and technical support for a successful R&D Tax Relief application. Platform went into production and began to support content creators, but the start-up folded at the end of the year. ASP.NET Core, Azure Service Fabric, Azure Cosmos DB and CQRS.

ASP.NET MVC Lead Developer

Led as the technical authority within the Digital Quote and Buy team responsible for the successful development, deployment and improvement of the core General Insurance products (such as Home, Motor, and Travel). Successfully designed and developed a prototype to demonstrate the concept. Led a team developing Aviva's next generation quotation platform utilising Akka.net, React, and SignalR.

Technical Lead

Applying Domain Driven Design techniques to build a new gaming platform from the ground up. Responsible for the design and development of the Banking (including payment processing for deposit and withdrawal), Bonus, Promotion, and Customer Engagement bounded contexts. Working with a small team of developers in a green field environment to successfully deploy, and grow the website such that it attracted new investment based on a £100m valuation. C#, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web API, Entity Framework 4, Rabbit MQ, SQL Server.

Senior Developer

Designing and leading development of a disruptive web based haulage planning system. Aided in the successful sale of the product into a number of established hauliers within the UK. Supported new deployments through training and on site "day-in-the-life" sessions. Led development of time-slot based activity sales software used by a well-known nationwide leisure company through a combination of online sales and back-office management portals. C#, ASP.NET Web Forms, ASMX, WCF, SQL Server.

Developer

Numerous multi-tier systems with VB6 COM+, XML with XSLT, and adopting .NET 1.0/1.1 C#.

University of York

University of East Anglia