Matthew Harward
I am a Lead Engineer with ten years of professional experience building elegant software that solves complex product-focused problems.
Experience
Thoughtworks, London, United Kingdom
Technical Lead
APRIL 2020 - AUGUST 2021
Providing tech leadership for a team working on a pricing solution for a large vehicle remarketing organisation.
Senior Developer
JULY 2019 - APRIL 2020
Developing new functionality with a team on a pricing solution for a large vehicle remarketing organisation.
Trade Me, Wellington, New Zealand
Trade Me is the largest domestic web presence in New Zealand, providing an online marketplace for goods, properties, vehicles, and jobs. While at the company, I primarily worked for the ‘Trade Me Jobs’ team.
Lead Engineer
OCTOBER 2018 - MAY 2019
I provided leadership on technical decisions for the development team. I was a people leader for five excellent developers alongside contributing to planning and development. This role allowed me to increasingly focus on DevOps and Continuous Delivery practice improvements. My key achievements in this role were:
- Overseeing the planning of work for three different squads. Including facilitating the inception of and direction for a new squad focussed on building data products.
- Onboarding, mentoring, and leading five developers.
- New initiatives to improve how we operate and build services, including trialling SLOs (Service Level Objectives), ADRs (Architectural Decision Records), correlatable requests, and assigning Technical Owners to our services.
- Revamping our on-call process, providing better observability through alerting with integrated runbooks.
- Overseeing successful migrations of infrastructure in AWS and on-prem.
Senior Software Developer
JULY 2016 - OCTOBER 2018
I worked as a key developer on a number of initiatives including developing a new job profiles product and being the lead developer on a new ATS (Applicant Tracking System). Other large projects included developing a template based PDF generation service, building a candidate search platform on top of Elasticsearch, and building out new infrastructure in AWS using Terraform. Core responsibilities included:
- Mentoring new developers, reviewing code, advising on technical solutions. Reducing siloed knowledge across Trade Me Jobs, including socialising successes and failures with public speaking.
- Developing new services and front ends from the ground up, as well as feature development on existing platforms.
- Working on Continuous Delivery practices by improving reliability of releases with strong test automation and solid build and deploy pipelines.
- Contributing across the business with involvement in groups related to security, unit testing, and health & safety.
Intermediate Software Developer
FEBRUARY 2015 - JULY 2016
I worked on the development and maintenance of the Trade Me Jobs’ job board, including search improvements, revamping the display of listings, pricing and invoicing improvements, and developing a recommendations engine.
Telogis (now Verizon Connect), Christchurch, New Zealand — Software Engineer
JULY 2011 - APRIL 2014
I worked on the development of a fleet informatics SaaS solution for planning, tracking, and reporting on large fleets of commercial vehicles. My work included:
- Development of event-driven customer facing workflow service to provide customisation for enterprise users.
- Design, development, and maintenance of customer facing and internal APIs.
- Design and development of a BI solution to provide big data analysis and customizable dashboards.
University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand — Tutor
FEBRUARY 2009 - NOV 2009
Tutoring undergraduate students in Introduction to Engineering and Distributed Computer Architectures courses.
Education
University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand — Bachelor of Science (Hons), Computer Science & Software Engineering, First Class Honours
JANUARY 2005 - DECEMBER 2009
Skills
Process
Agile, Scrum, Kanban, XP, LEAN IT/Canvas
Design Thinking, Story Mapping, Specification By Example, Pair Programming
Languages, Tools & Frameworks
C#, .NET, .NET Core, VB .NET, Web API, WPF, WCF, WWF, IIS
HTML, CSS, SASS, JS, TypeScript, Angular, ng-CLI, RXJS, jQuery, Knockout
SQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, NEST, RabbitMQ
AWS, Terraform, S3, Lambda, EC2, ECS, Api Gateway, IAM, RDS, ALB
JIRA, Confluence, Mercurial, Git, GitHub, GitLab, GitSecret, Teamcity, CircleCI, Upsource
Visual Studio, VS Code, Rider, Webstorm
Techniques
CI/CD, Four Key Metrics, Test & Process Automation, Unit Testing, Code Coverage, Fitness Functions
OO Programming, Design Patterns, DI, RESTful APIs, OWASP, HATEOAS
AB Testing, Feature Flags, Configuration as a Service SLOs, Alerting & Monitoring, Runbooks, ADRs, Infrastructure as Code
Hobbies & Interests
Travelling, Dancing, Hiking, Cooking, Board Gaming, Painting, and Numismatics.