John Field BSc MSc
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/JohnFieldUK
Location: Walthamstow, London E17
https://bit.ly/johnfieldcv
Technical leadership, operational agility, organisation building.
Technical leader with extensive software engineering and operational agility experience, with an emphasis on social impact.
Multiple leadership roles technical, organisational, and people skills; cross-business; comfortable with hands-on, hands-off, on-site and remote approaches. Self-directed with interest in Modern Agile and emerging organisational practices.
I’m seeking further challenges and growth opportunities in “Tech for Good” and social impact, including EdTech and CivicTech.
Summary
Engineering Manager, LibLynx Identity, Access and Analytics (July 2021 - present)
LibLynx provides a PaaS to the scholarly publishing community, enabling industry-specific identity and access, rights management, and analytics as a B2B integration for their own products and services.
- Lead and grow engineering team, structure, strategy
- Organisation building; enabling company to transition from start-up to scale-up in context of organic growth and diverse client needs
- Encourage business agility and execution; increase organisational responsiveness in a sustainable way via operational practices and workflows; including roadmaps, day-to-day task management, client-facing and internal tooling and documentation, project and product management, infosec, hiring, client onboarding, technical planning
- Work cross-business with CEO, CTO, client success, other key partners in highly skilled niche team
- Productivity, feature, and tooling stack includes: PHP, MySQL, IP authentication, SAML SSO, Docker, Project COUNTER, Open Access, data pipelines, Asana, GitLab (specifics confidential)
Lead Engineer, Senior Engineer Apolitical (July 2019 - Mar 2021)
GovTech startup of 35, building the first global learning platform for government.
- • Build up Engineering team via hiring, culture, and process
- • Increase platform capability, performance, functionality- support 300% user growth and product expansion
- • Migrate away from legacy WordPress / PHP system to modern services architecture - Node, React, MySQL, Postgres, Auth0, Google Cloud Platform (GCP, GKE), Kubernetes, Docker, Gitlab CI / CD, Terraform, Python (data science, including semantic tech), elasticsearch
- • Build out team culture along with team size. Foster learning mindset, modern agile approaches, self-organising team. Line management of engineering team of five including mentoring, coaching
- • Work with founders, Product, Data, Growth teams on products via strategy, roadmaps and delivery via OKRs
Senior Software Engineer, BBC Studios / BBC Worldwide (July 2017 - May 2019)
- Built BBC Studios Sales global content showcase of BBC programmes / formats for international licensing, contributing to £1B sales
- Greenfield multi-service architecture: Symfony, Silex, PHP, modern Javascript, Node, JSON API, Express, React, Elasticsearch, GraphQL, MySQL, Postgres, Docker
- Mixed-role team of up to 10: Kanban, DevOps, JIRA, CI / CD (Jenkins), Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, Splunk
Senior Software Architect, Alexander Street (Jan 2012 - Jan 2017)
Strategic / managerial role for digital humanities publisher. Acquired by ProQuest in June 2016.
- Senior technical leadership and manager
- Define, communicate and evangelise architecture, design, delivery, and maintenance of platforms, tools, processes, projects, etc. to support and promote business goals both strategic and technical
- Envision, ideation, and delivery of product and technology strategy, concepts, and roadmaps
- Architecture; Prototyping; Mentoring; Coaching; Knowledge Transfer; Strategy Realisation; Technical Leadership; Agile Methodologies; Continuous Improvement
- Define, communicate and evangelise architecture, design, delivery, and maintenance of platforms, tools, processes, projects, etc. to support and promote business goals
- Envision, ideation, and delivery of product and technology strategy, concepts, and roadmaps
- Promote good practice and group ownership in development processes, system quality and knowledge, testing and related QA guidelines, component integration, etc.
- Define, promote and revise project delivery guidelines (specs, workflows, testing guidelines, documentation, etc.)
- Strategic analysis to pivot/adjust strategy and tactical activities
- Communication / mentoring of strategy / tactics to team members
- Oversee and mentor Architect and Engineer roles
- Combine with Tech Lead / Team Lead duties as required
Key Achievements
- Main deliverable: “LAZR” - https://search.alexanderstreet.com content discovery / delivery / consumption platform - tech stack includes Solr 5.x, Symfony 2.x, Drupal 7.x, JavaScript media players, Agile practices, and a chunk of backend legacy / CRM / content-pipeline code. Delivered in an iterative manner since 2013
- Architect related work in parallel to the Team / Tech Lead position
- As with there, much of this stuff relates to numerous internal projects. Ask me! ﭢ
Tech Lead, Team Lead, Alexander Street (January 2014 - Jan 2017)
Tech (Engineer) Lead
- Lead day-to-day technical delivery of multiple projects
- Lead in project feasibility study, breakdown, specification, technical approach, analysis and design, estimation, etc.
- Ownership of project processes (sprint planning, effort estimates, commitment, etc.), project artefacts (documentation, maintenance flows, etc.), quality activities (code review, automated functionality and performance testing, deployment processes, etc.)
- Demonstrate technical leadership and evangelism
- Provide visibility into a project (work progress, impediments, risks, etc.)
- Liaise with Project Manager, senior technical, and other roles to ensure project delivery, quality metrics, etc. are met
Team (Project) Lead
- Liaise with team members (including Project Manager and Tech Lead) for proactive task allocation and delivery
- Encourage continuous improvement via retrospectives, kaizen, reducing technical debt, internal refactoring, etc.improving code quality
- Mentor and grow team members
Key Achievements
- Tech / Team Lead for the LAZR API - a very hands-on role
- Evangelised and championed Agile adoption within the organisation
- Lead for "Admin Portal" - Drupal 7- based CRM and customer self-service; support DDA / PDA / EBA business models, e-commerce, etc.
- Lead for legacy product migration
- Lead for numerous internal projects. Ask me! ﭢ
Senior Developer, Alexander Street (June 2006 - September 2010)
- Critical role in development team for design, development, QA, deployment & maintenance of a bespoke publishing platform for over 20 text, print reference, graphical, audio, and video humanities and social science collections for use by thousands of institutions worldwide
- Specification/feature breakdown, research & development; integration; deployment; maintenance; short term and long-term tasks and processes; work allocation & prioritisation; large-scale data-import & manipulation
- Collaboration with Chief Technology Officer/CTO, Head of Development, global & local development teams, non-technical staff, QA staff, UI designers, and others in a virtual office; requiring high verbal and written communication skills
- Large degree of initiative, self-motivation, and self-organisation for both independent and team-based work
- Knowledge transfer/mentoring with other developers of components and architecture
- System, server, and database administration & support
- Evangelising agile processes adoption, including Scrum & Kanban, over legacy waterfall/ad hoc model; expose and improve process issues
- Evangelising social media adoption
- Evangelising of 'Do The Right Thing' development techniques to codebase/company development practices, e.g. ActiveRecord, code/content separation, dogfooding, 80/20 rule, DRY, YAGNI, retrospectives, refactoring, late-binding optimization, recognition of technical debt, centralisation of documentation/issue tracking, code formatting & conventions
- Effectively project lead for numerous product development/release projects
LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), object-oriented PHP 5, custom MVC platform, Zend Framework, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Prototype, script.aculo.us, Xapian, Eclipse, Subversion, Linux (Ubuntu), TRAC, XML, Firebug, OOP Platform design, domain & DNS configuration, dOxygen, PHPDoc, Skype, Basecamp, Scrum, Kanban
Learning Platform Lead, AVADO (Mar 2017 - June 2017)
I.T. Lecturer & Course Manager, School Of Computing, Highbury College (1997-2000)
Volunteering
Community Facebook Group Administrator (2016-present)
"Walthamstow Life"
"Walthamstow Life" community Facebook group. Grown over 38,000 members by organic growth, recommendations, and member feedback.
Setting group rules, including around inclusive tone and community-based content in a big, diverse group; fostering community culture; community events and news; conflict management and resolution, including sensitive or controversial topics; automated tools to prevent spam and abuse; and helping find lost cats.
London National Park City (2023-present)
London National Park City is a movement and charity applying the concept of national parks, including quality-of-life and green associations, to London.
London became the world’s first National Park City in 2019.
Involved since NPLC's founding in 2014, as of July 2023 I’ve begun volunteering with project management, website migration and community growth.