About Me
Backend software engineer at Sky (NBCU) specialising in functional Scala (Typelevel). Building and operating high-throughput microservices on Kubernetes (EKS/GKE) for content discovery/recommendations across Peacock and other Sky/NBCU streaming platforms, with Kafka event streaming and Cassandra persistence. Strong focus on performance tuning, observability, and distributed systems.
Current side project: SugarSentry - an ESP32-based IoT device for real-time blood glucose visualisation.
London, UK. Right to work in the UK.
Key Skills
Scala 3 (Typelevel: Cats Effect, FS2, Tapir), Kafka, Cassandra, Kubernetes (EKS/GKE), AWS/GCP, OpenTelemetry, ArgoCD/Argo Rollouts, Istio, performance profiling (JFR/JMC).
Experience
- Service owner for a core orchestration service assembling recommendation rails across Peacock, Sky TV and Showmax; accountable for SLOs (uptime/error/latency) and live-event on-call operations
- Reduced per-page entity filtering/business-logic p99 from 50ms → 10ms while processing ~1M entities/page by profiling with JFR/JMC and removing allocation hotspots (lower GC pressure)
- Improved end-to-end page assembly/orchestration p99 from 300ms @ 50 pages/sec/pod to 250ms @ 100 pages/sec/pod by heap tuning and bounded thread pools after saturating downstream HTTP/2 calls to ML recommenders
- Parallelised + batched rail assembly so 100 rails adds <10ms vs single-rail requests
- Implemented progressive delivery with Argo Rollouts (canary/blue-green)
- Migrated production services from Akka to Typelevel (Cats Effect, FS2, Tapir), improving change lead time and long-term maintainability
- Implemented OpenTelemetry tracing (otel4s) to improve incident triage across service boundaries and protect SLOs
- Operated multi-region Kubernetes deployments (EKS/GKE) and configured Istio traffic policies (timeouts, retries, outlier detection)
- Supported peak live-event traffic across Peacock, Sky TV, Showmax (performance + on-call)
- Deployed Scala microservices in Kubernetes on GCP and AWS
- Set up Jenkins and ArgoCD CI/CD pipelines
- Worked with Kafka and Cassandra for event-driven data processing
- Built backends using Java (Spring Boot) and Node.js
- Developed frontends with JavaScript / React
- Implemented testing with JUnit5, Mockito, Jest, and Cypress
Career change from Project Management to Software Engineering via self-study (data structures/algorithms + software design) and personal projects.
Managed delivery of 100+ web projects. Coordinated cross-functional teams, oversaw infrastructure (load balancing, DNS, security).
Projects
ESP32 ambient blood glucose visualisation (e-ink), integrating Dexcom API and environmental sensors.
- Embedded C++ on ESP32 with low-power design for battery-powered always-on display
- Dexcom API integration + e-ink UI for real-time and historical readings
- Hardware integration: BME280 + VCNL4040 sensors, charging circuitry
Python tool implementing anti-stylometry techniques for linguistic privacy.
Education
Portsmouth University
BSc Psychology
2009 - 2012
Dissertation focused on virtual vs. face-to-face communication efficiency.
A Little More About Me
Interests: outdoors, PC gaming, audio hardware, sci-fi/fantasy.