Experience

Mission Decisions Limited

• Chief Data Architect

  • Feb 2023 - Present

  Data Infrastructure and Analytics projects within the Defence Sector Data Infrastructure and Analytics projects within the Defence Sector



Hastings Direct

• United Kingdom
• Insurance
• 700 & Above Employee

• Head of Data Architecture

  • Mar 2022 - Nov 2022

  Hastings Direct are a Home and Motor Insurance company. I was asked to join the CDO team to execute the Data Strategy of an on-premise Netezza and Hadoop migration to Azure Cloud using Snowflake, Databricks and Azure ML studio. This Data Strategy also included the implementation of a Single Version of the Customer project using MParticle and Braze. Hastings Direct are a Home and Motor Insurance company. I was asked to join the CDO team to execute the Data Strategy of an on-premise Netezza and Hadoop migration to Azure Cloud using Snowflake, Databricks and Azure ML studio. This Data Strategy also included the implementation of a Single Version of the Customer project using MParticle and Braze.



esure

• United States

• Enterprise Data Architect

  • Dec 2017 - Mar 2022

  Esure are a Home and Motor Insurance company. I was asked to set the Data Strategy of a move from a monolithic Oracle based private data centre setup to a Cloud based architecture. Data was a key piece that they were looking to modernise and develop. - Define the future IT Data Strategy / Vision for the company - Data Lake 1.0 o Designed and executed the AWS Data Lake 1.0 and Data ingestion using AWS managed services - API Gateway, Lambda, Kinesis, Data Pipeline, EMR, Apache Spark, S3 - Data Lake 2.0 o Looking to improve on our first Data Lake experience with a new remit to published Machine Learning to a Live IT production environment I oversaw the design and execution of Databricks using Delta Tables / Data pipelines and MLFlow - Involved in the structing of a Data Governance framework throughout the organisation and tasked with the tool selection to execute the framework - Outlined a new service model of DataOps whereby data within the company can be accessed self-service rather than through the bottleneck of a specific team - Advised with the uptake of new transactional databases of which AWS Aurora PostgreSQL / DynamoDB we used for microservices. - Data product evaluation Databricks, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch, GCP Spanner, Kubernetes (EKS) - Data Visualisations with DataDog, Tableau and Power BI - Assisted with the knowledge share of python as the language for Data Science Core Technologies: Databricks, GCP Cloud, AWS - Redshift / Redshift Spectrum, AWS Aurora, Athena, Lambda, Kinesis, EMR, Python, Kubernetes Show less



Location Sciences

• United Kingdom
• Information Services
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Big Data Architect

  • Jun 2017 - Nov 2017

  Mobile advertising company Location Science had experienced explosive growth (x1000) in mobile GPS events every month. I was hired to stabilise the current setup and build a cost effective environment for growth. - Redesigned AWS Redshift to stabilise the current environment - Designed and developed a typical AWS S3 Data Lake utilising Python, Kinesis, Data Pipeline, EMR, Apache Spark and Zeppelin notebooks - GIS location-based intelligence Data Science - Design and implemented a location intelligence data piece for a client which ended up winning an industry award https://ondeviceresearch.com/blog/on-device-research,-google-and-omd-win-iab-europe-research-award-for-brand-effectiveness - Data Visualisations with DataDog and YellowFin - Agile Development Core Technologies: AWS Cloud – Redshift, Redshift Spectrum, Athena, Lambda, Kinesis, Data Pipeline, EMR, Apache Spark, Zeppelin notebooks, DataDog, Jira, Confluence, Github, Python Show less



5one - A MasterCard Company

• Head of Data Innovation

  • Mar 2011 - May 2017

  5one Marketing was a specialist marketing data scientist company which provided consulting, analytics and technology solutions aimed at creating business value from consumer loyalty data. The start-up company was acquired by Laser in 2011 and then MasterCard in 2015.Due to the ever-changing landscape of IT and data science I was promoted to the role of Head of Data Innovation to look for operational optimisations and to prepare the company for the future. The role was 50/50 hands on and management. Notable projects included- Replacement of 5one’s failing personalisation module which added improvements and the ability to scale 60x. The tool was paramount to our main client PnP and lead to the resigning and further extensions of the contract.- Developed in-house Big Data strategy (Vertica / Hadoop / Spark) to support data scientists with their work. This reduced insight delivery from weeks to hours/days.- Led investigation into moving the entire solution to a cloud-based AWS solution. This removed the upfront Capex cost of infrastructure needed and as a result meant that client projects we had previously turned away were now financially viable.- Investigate the potential of replacing SAS with open source solutions such as python or R. Our data scientist started to use the alternatives for certain problems.- Rapid Application Development with APEX. Designed, built, deployed applications with a significantly reduced delivery time. As well as the development cost savings the company require less staff to support end to end process.- How to scale statistical methods for big data sets i.e. kmeans, decision trees. This led to statistical methods being run inside of the database instead of dragging the data out.- POC with MapD to reduce application response times from minutes to seconds. Show less

• Head of Data Engineering

  • Apr 2006 - Mar 2011

  5one was a specialised Data Analytics Marketing company- Management of a team of seven plus mentored individuals from different departments who possessed little knowledge and nurturing them to be able support and develop systems- Scoping client requirements - Designing terabyte (50TB) data warehouse solutions- Core database design (Star / Snowflake)- System and storage design- Multi billion row data migrations- Developing PL/SQL code (packages / procedure / triggers)- DBA production support of sixteen databases assisted with automated devops tools which I wrote myself - Oracle performance tuning - Vertica performance tuningInitial the job was 100% hands on but later developed into managing a team and the strategy. I was the architect of the complete core end to end automated solution from client transfer, database ETL, QA automation, data cleansing and data aggregation for 5one’s web applications.These systems were in use for global blue-chip clients - BP Europe (10 Markets), AMEX, Boots, EA, Red Bull, BUPA, Game, Woolworths (SA), Clicks (SA), Pick and Pay (SA), Sonae (Portugal), Makro, Musgrave, Coop and Ocado.Notable achievements:- Redesigned and developed a broken in-house application (shopper centre performance) to become the company’s flag ship product able to produce reports / analysis in minutes on multi million row tables. One client said it could never happen with the volume of their data and another won a European award for operation break through.- Reducing the batch process from twenty hours to five with just the redesign of the PL/SQL code to support not only the current but previous releases, with the added capability for users to alter table definition without the need for any code changes.- Redesigned solutions which would have been three times more expensive to produce. - A number of solutions which enable users without coding experience to be able modify / add to the applications without the need for a developer. Show less



Betfair

• United Kingdom
• Software Development
• 400 - 500 Employee

• Oracle DBA / Developer

  • Jan 2005 - Apr 2006

  Betfair a financial on-line betting exchange operating a 24/7 highly transactional (considered to the fifth highest throughput in the world). My role as a production performance DBA consisted of the diagnosis and resolution of all database issues, normal production tasks (backup, monitoring, dataguard, OMS) and load testing of new code releases, upgrades and Oracle patches. I not only performed as a DBA but applied my development experience devising solutions and improvements to the overall PL/SQL bet engine. Throughout my time at the company I contributed a number of significant code improvements, which helped to eventually achieve the SLA of 99.9% of bets placed sub-second. Notable achievements: - Educate developers on the topics of bind variable usage, reduce excessive over parsing SQL, new and existing features of the Oracle database - Rework of PL/SQL code to reduce database contention resulting in a 300% increase in throughput of transactions during peak times - Implementation of JBOSS prepared cursor caching reducing system load by 25% - Diagnosis and resolution of loss of PL/SQL commit optimisation during settlement operations. Due to this market settlement times were halved. - Re-work of code to reduce the number of SQL statements needed for operations – thus reducing repetitive context switching between the PL/SQL and SQL engines - 64Bit Upgrade to introduce ODM reducing Solaris system/kernel time by 20% - Re-evaluation of Oracle parameters - Migration / Re-Design of MySQL 4.0 databases and code to Oracle 10g Core Technologies: Oracle, Veritas Clustering, Quest Shareplex, NetApp, Spotlight, PL/SQL Developer, Perforce Show less



Accenture

• Ireland
• Business Consulting and Services
• 700 & Above Employee

• Oracle DBA Consultant

  • Nov 2004 - Jan 2005

  Oracle DBA Consultant role to oversee the upgrading of Thames Waters Oracle implementations. Core Technologies: Oracle, HP-UX Oracle DBA Consultant role to oversee the upgrading of Thames Waters Oracle implementations. Core Technologies: Oracle, HP-UX


Rangegate
• IT Services and IT Consulting
• Oracle DBA / Developer

  • Jul 2002 - Nov 2004

NSW Government of Corrective Services
• Sys Admin / IT Support

  • Nov 2001 - May 2002

Orion Media Marketing
• IT Services and IT Consulting
• Sys Admin / IT Support

  • Apr 1999 - Oct 2000