Colin Rouse

I am the Engineering Director of the Customer department, which contains 3 teams and cover areas including onboarding new clients, managing their wallets, collects and serves internal client configuration, notifies clients of various updates, and generates regulatory reports. They use a combination of Ruby and Java, monolith and microservice architectures, and REST and event-driven communication. We use a combination of scrum, OKRs and year-long roadmaps to plan and deliver work, with strong focus around CI/CD and DORA metrics. I also wrote the competency frameworks for all levels of software engineering, including management. Whilst I drove this, it involved collaboration and feedback from multiples areas of the business. We then implemented this through quarterly growth OKRs and annual performance assessments.

Manager of 3 software development teams within the supply chain department of OSP, responsible for predicting product demand and connecting work flows together from numerous external picking facilities onto our supply chain systems.

I manage 5 teams in OSP CFC Infrastructure with a focus on organisational improvements: stakeholder engagement, visibility of current and upcoming work, communication, team process (including scrum and kanban), clarity around department mission and vision, teamwork (especially horizontally between managers and not just their teams), recruitment, performance management, conflict resolution and work prioritisation. The teams use a large range of technology, including Kubernetes, Ceph, OpenStack, Docker, ELK, Postgres, Cassandra, Python, AWS, GCP and Azure. Most teams have a Product Owner and a Team Lead. The teams are highly technical and passionate about delivering high quality systems.

Help drive best practices with software development teams and senior management, to increase technical quality and support people professional development. The focus was on best practices within the software development lifecycle, including security threat modelling, creating a multi-department technology radar (showing several hundred different languages, libraries and frameworks in place) and team process improvements (covering agile and lean principles and practices).

Helped develop a Pick Station product for the warehouse with several dev teams in Ho Chi Minh City and then in Krakow. This was an exploration exercise in outsourcing and also the product owner role. We now use product owners throughout the division.

My current role is with Java EE development using Glassfish, Maven, JPA and JMS. The JMS part consists of a very large and realtime network. My previous role involved development on a real-time, multi-threaded GUI in WPF. This was an involved and complex piece of work that resulted in an application used by over 200 users. The multi-threaded architecture, designed by myself and my Team Leader, handled asynchronous communication between hardware, users and an Oracle backend. Subsequent work involved doing extensive profiling and resulted in a highly optimised application. I also served as on-call support for a critical warehouse system for which I did Java development.

I worked on several realtime warehouse systems, using Java and C#, with a heavy focus on unit testing.

Developed an asset manager and a stocktaking application in .Net. I was involved in the whole lifecycle, from requirements gathering, design and architecture, implementation and testing, to delivery and support. Technologies C#, WPF, LINQ, NUnit, Java, PL/SQL, Struts, AWK, SVN, Continuous Integration

Year mark 72% Project mark 72%

Thesis mark Pass with Distinction