Stuart Dallas

Overview

  • 25+ years in software engineering across a wide range of companies and industries.
  • Recruited, mentored, and managed software engineers of all levels.
  • Track record of delivering quality software, both as an IC, and as part of a team.
  • Experienced in a variety of languages, with a recent focus on Go and Python.
  • Passionate about development processeses, automation, and CI.
  • Effective verbal and written communicator.

Career Highlights

  • Built a secure hybrid platform for a medical device, scaled to 100+ installed sites.
  • Designed and led the implemention of a social network for the travel industry.
  • Created a multi-tenant CMS for a luxury travel company, with significant cost savings.
  • Rebuilt a classified ads website helping achieve a 3x growth in MAU.
  • Built an agent to report hardware & software to an asset tracking system for schools.
  • Mentored several junior & mid-level engineers, helping them grow into senior roles.

Key Skills

used recently; for a full list see LinkedIn*
  • Hard: Requirements gathering, system design, technical and user documentation, defining and implementing development processes, effective communication across all levels, automation, CI/CD, code reviews.
  • Soft: Pastoral care, mentoring, recruitment, and professional development.
  • Languages: Go, Python, HCL, HTML / CSS / JS / TS / React.
  • Tools & technologies: Kafka, Cassandra, Docker, IaC (Terraform, Ansible, Chef), Cloud (mainly AWS, some GCP and others), Nomad / Consul.

Professional Experience

Monzo • London (remote), UK

Backend Engineer (Contract)

  • Joined the Cards Squad, which handles card issuing and payment processing.
  • Go-based microservice codebase, running on Kubernetes, AWS Keyspaces, and Kafka.
  • Addressed several areas of long-standing tech debt.
  • Improved observability and reduced alerting noise.
  • Applied current internal best practices to legacy code.
  • Worked on key pieces of the integration with Mastercard.
  • Contributed to platform tools and libraries.

Oxehealth • Oxford, UK

Lead Platform Architect

  • Responsible for the architecture of the product and cloud platforms.
  • Worked with the SRE & compliance teams to ensure platform reliability and security.
  • Hands-on role in platform development, team mentoring, and code reviews.
  • Served as the technical authority on the platform across the company.
  • Built several internal CLI tools and web-based (React) frontends.

Systems Architect

  • Created a secure, remotely-managed platform for installation on customer sites.
  • Technology used included Python, Chef, Ansible, MySQL, KMS, OpenVPN, Prometheus/Grafana, Consul/Vault/Nomad, Jenkins, and GitLab CI.
  • Built a supporting cloud infrastructure on AWS with Terraform, including large-scale data storage and analysis tooling, and secure remote access to deployed systems.
  • Scaled from one installation in 2017 to over 100 as of early 2023.

3ft9 • London/Reading, UK

Contract Software Engineer

A representative selection of work undertaken:

  • Oxehealth: evaluated options for storing large amounts of video and numeric data.
  • Cognitive Logic: reviewed an internal Python project for viability as a standalone product; prepared the codebase for production use.
  • Powder Byrne International: PHP/MySQL website, built a custom multi-tenant CMS.
  • Travel Weekly Group: recruited and led a team to build a vertical social network using PHP, MySQL, and Neo4j.

Datasift • Reading, UK

Technical Architect

  • Designed several significant platform features and led their implementation.
  • Contributed to the platform architecture, development processes, and QA controls.
  • Expanded line management and mentoring responsibilities.

Principal Engineer

  • Ran a team of Scala developers, focused on the ingestion end of the platform.
  • Worked with the VP of Engineering to introduce and refine an agile dev process.
  • Line-managed and mentored two junior developers.

Early Career

see LinkedIn* for details
Freeads Classifieds • Head of Technology
IT Vision • Senior Software Engineer
TRADA • Software Engineer
RCP Consultants • Software Engineer
Lab Impex Systems • Software Engineer (BSc year in industry)

Other Work

Personal projects

  • MyEPR: Personal Electronic Patient Record; WIP, currently for personal use only.
  • Photography: various types, including a stint covering UK and France-based WSBK.
    » https://stuartdallas.photography/
  • Hosting infrastruture: small Nomad/Consul cluster (you're using it now).
    » https://go.stut.me/platform
  • Aleff: Automated Let's Encrypt For FabioLB.
    » https://aleff.dev/
  • TwitApps: Reply and follower notifications for Twitter. (coverage: launch & shutdown)
    » Launch: https://go.stut.me/twitapps-launch
    » Shutdown: https://go.stut.me/twitapps-shutdown
  • More on GitHub.
    » https://github.com/stut

Collaborations

  • 1000 Players - One Game of Doom: supplied and configured servers, added metrics, and scaled to support up to 4,000 simultaneous viewers. Skip to 14:00 for the action.
    https://go.stut.me/twitch-doom-video
  • The Spodcast: geeky podcast; producer and co-host.
    » https://spodcast.org/
  • TwitOrFit: hotornot for Twitter; architecture and backend implementation.
    » https://go.stut.me/twitorfit
  • Tweetmeme: Twitter link aggregator; architecture and initial backend dev.
    » https://go.stut.me/tweetmeme
  • retwt.me: architecture and backend implementation.
    » https://go.stut.me/retwtme

Education

Bournemouth University
BSc (Hons) Software Engineering Management