Sam Dowsett

– Responsible for all aspects of two cross functional teams. Achieving lowest turn over of any team in this post acquisition healthcare startup. With more than 80 percent of my 10 direct reports promoted in one year. – Created and built relationships with other departments in the parent company to share modern software best practices to improve engineering culture without impacting safety and quality. – Championed/coached agile methods and continuous delivery reducing customer impacting defects by 80% compared to previous years, and removing the requirement for after hours deployments entirely. – Responsible for regulatory and compliance for a class 3 software as a service medical device, and successful submission and clearance of a US FDA premarket approval of a new generation of the device.

– Hired to create a new technology group aimed at improving the delivery capability and empower our engineers to solve customer problems without risk through the application of continuous delivery techniques, agile coaching and lean product development treating the company engineers as first class customers. – Developed an implementation strategy and timeline for these techniques to take the organization from a low performer (DORA metrics) to an elite performing company. The executive has made this vision A key pillar of the technology strategy. – Assembled and managed a team of four Developers (Junior to Staff level) and 4 Site Reliability Engineers to support existing legacy development activities and incrementally to implement the future vision. – Drafted an architecture and workstream to move a monolithic single tenant per instance application to a micro service based, cloud native multi tenanted ecosystem.

– Springboot, Java, Angular.Js/Typescript/WebGL, Postgres, Kubernetes, – I started as a Senior developer in a team responsible for ongoing development of a single page web application for visualization of 3d point cloud scans of real world spaces allowing organizational collaboration and management anywhere in the world. – I have successfully introduced modern agile techniques to reduce release cycles and vastly optimize the time from an idea to a feature that provides value to our customer. – Most recently I put together and lead a team on a major strategic initiative to re-architect our software as a service offering to run in a kubernetes cluster while coaching the transformation techniques of continuous delivery that I bring to this group and beyond. – I have also had the privilege of jumping into the deep end of 3D graphics programming with a performance requirement unlike any experience in my career before; It's remarkable how satisfying learning such new things always can be.

– Springboot, Java, Ember.Js, Postgres, Kubernetes, Redhat Enterprise Linux – Microsoft dot net/dotnet core, React.Js, SQL server Windows Server 2016, Kubernetes, Redhat Enterprise Linux – I spent 18 months leading a cross functional software development capability in what is known as the transformation team. – Working closely with senior technology and change management to design and build bespoke tools and process demonstrating and allowing all delivery teams within New Zealand to reduce the time from concept to having working software in production, reducing risk, improving tech employee experience and customer satisfaction. – Prior to this I was responsible for 2 scrum teams and sat on the technical leadership group in a long running stream of work to provide a consistent set of tools and user experience to branch staff. This involved consuming a microservices ecosystem in a rich client side browser application implemented in React js, My teams also contributed to the overall capability of the ecosystem; publishing microservices for use by other clients such as mobile applications.

– Microsoft dot net, dot net core, React/Angular/Backbone, Windows, Aws EC2 – I initially joined Partstrader as an application architect. With three other members of the architecture team I was responsible for the technical leadership of the business to business online tendering platform focusing on automobile repair. – My main focuses in this role were – Ensuring and communicating standards of quality and best practices among the wider development team. – Collaborating with the infrastructure department to ensure fast stable and secure application hosting. – High level design of new systems and their interactions and assessment of new technologies for use in the full software stack. – Ensuring development team goals and the technology produced aligned with the personal goals of tech teams and solved the problems of the business stakeholders and customers. – Encouraging a culture of innovation and experimentation amongst the whole company, both in New Zealand and America. – In addition to my role on the application architecture board I was tech lead and finally manager of a team of six developers and two testers. Fifty percent of this team capacity was dedicated to dev-ops tasks relating to deployment procedures, housekeeping of source control repositories, and development support of our customers and customer facing teams. The remainder of this team capacity was dedicated to architectural initiatives as planned by the architecture group. I held the role of product owner for this workstream. This team worked in a modified kanban style that I developed with my team which we called "pragmatic kanban". – Project Rutherford - Breaking up a monolithic system: The Partstrader core systems had been originally built as a monolithic and slightly outdated Microsoft.Net WCF soap service based application with a traditional N-Teir architecture. Over a few years of staff growth it had become too large for any person to understand everything and therefore release cycles were slow and had high risk of defects and business disruption. Project rutherford was a long term stream of smaller projects that I developed with the architecture board to break this tightly coupled mega application into conceptually separated micro service that together could fulfil the functions of the existing application but were separately deployable and maintainable by much smaller teams and therefore could vastly increase the speed with which enhancements and fixes could be rolled out to our customers and increase stability and confidence while reducing staff stress and workload. My kanban team worked our way through the first 5 phases of this work stream while we were operating. – Fedex Day - Deliver a product in 24 hours: Adapting an annual event that I was involved in during my time at Trade Me where every employee at the company may conceive of a product and recruit a team to help build a presentable version in 24 hours. With encouragement to try new skills (or existing expertise you are not able to show in your day job the theme of the day was “Make life better for yourself, other employees and our customers". I negotiated with the executive to arrange the time away from day jobs for all 120 people in PTML US and PTML NZ as well as a budget for prizes, materials and entertainment for the day. I also used my network locally to gain sponsorship from local businesses. During the event which ran simultaneously in Wellington and Chicago I acted as master of ceremonies and documentarian (and gave technical assistance when several teams got into trouble). In total 24 of 25 projects that started were presented to a judging panel made up of the company executive (unable to recruit the skilled teams needed to build their pitches) each gave an award. The overall prize was awarded by popular vote

– Microsoft dot net, jQuery, sql server, backbone, IOS objective C, windows – TradeMe Fashion: I was tech lead on an 18 month special project team whose mandate was to rejuvenate sales and transform the underlying technology in the largest category under the TradeMe marketplace business unit. An emphasis on SOLID principles and inherently stable patterns, testability and minimal cyclomatic complexity lead to a new platform that allowed great collaboration between developers, designers and User experience experts, It is google optimized, much more user friendly and has increased search traffic and sell through rates year on year and against other categories. I lead these projects iteratively to reduce risk. Relying on metrics gathered from actual usage tracking built into the platform, third party analytics such as google analytics, extensive A/B/C testing of new features and constant feedback from the very large and vocal user base This was particularly useful as it lead to the ability to change tack a couple of times when enhancements were not quite so successful in production as they were on paper. In each iteration we collaboratively defined a series of minimum viable products to release as early and then filling out further functionality while collating the feedback. – Phase One: Restructuring: Overcoming historical design constraints and paying down large amounts of technical debt. My team finished off a long term project to remove those constraints culminating in an all-night release and scheduled site outage allowing time for a massive data migration. I also learned about the ingenious browser hacks users had invented to circumvent this historical constraint; an insight that has served me well ever since. – Phase 2: Search enhancement: With the foundation laid in phase one we took the challenge to formally solve the problems we uncovered in phase 1. Ul components were designed, A/B tested and user tested. – Phase 3: Launch of Trade Me Fashion: A fashion home page was added to the site to coincide with a marketing campaign. My team and I built a recommendation engine taking into account previous browsing behavior and user information to provide a feed of recommended listings merged with Trade Me staff curated promotions. This phase included a content management component built using Asp.net Mvc 3 and twitter bootstrap to allow line of business staff to moderate and create content without the need for developers to help. This was also the first live prototype of the new listing layout for browse and search which was the focus of phase 4. – Phase 4: Redesign: This was where the binders were removed and we re-built the browse and search web platform from scratch to create the modern masonry style layout I had been developing throughout the previous phases. The final point release of this phase was the implementation of a modern ajax browse and search experience allowing all interaction to be done dynamically without jarring page postbacks. The move to an ajax architecture began unifying the web platform and the mobile native device applications in front of a common API finally creating precedent for a traditional web service based architecture allowing much smoother reuse of features among all development teams.

– Java spring/Oracle/ Websphere – Microsoft dot net, Vanilla Javascript, sql server 2008/10, Windows

– Java spring/Oracle/ Websphere – Microsoft dot net, Vanilla Javascript, sql server 2008/10, Windows