Nick Powell

I work with API and Mobile teams to develop customer-focussed, robustly tested, high-quality features and performance improvements for mobile apps with over 2M monthly active users across international markets. Besides an inspiring commitment to helping the planet by accelerating our move to electrical power, Kraken and Octopus have a fantastic culture of rigorous testing and review, fast-paced development and continuous releases.

·       Developed Python, Django, REST and GraphQL APIs across a massive codebase.

·       Designed and created a “backend-driven UI” API, powering dynamic content accessed over 2M times/month – a highly visible, customer-facing feature delivered to tight deadlines for marketing, requiring strong attention to detail.

·       Worked with Celery jobs to improve speed and database efficiency

·       PostgreSQL including model design and efficient queries

·       Helped design the architecture of complex API interactions with third parties, for example to debug performance issues.

·       Collaborated with API and app developers, designers, and marketing to improve customer experiences.

·       Several side-projects, including with image processing and machine learning (PyTorch) to help improve the efficiency of operations tasks.

Part of an infrastructure team managing the build, CI/CD, testing and code review and repository systems which enable over 300 developers to reliably, securely and efficiently get their code into production.

·       Designed and deployed distributed microservices in Go and Python to cloud environments (GCP/AWS) using “infrastructure as code” with Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform and Bash.

·       Leading projects, I’ve researched, scoped, planned, subdivided and delegated work; written designs, and overseen progress and coordinated delivery to deadlines.

·       Revamped a test analysis system to give developers insight into test duration and “flakiness”, storing millions of test results per day in an efficient Postgres DB.

·       Lead, Python Working Group (1y): steered a team of 7, devoting 20% time to managing our toolchain, code, and libraries.

·       CI/CD: Designed improvements to our custom system to efficiently build a large monorepo, and automate deployments. Added automated error detection, Kibana integration, Slack alerts.

·       Helped design and implement a service tracking and upgrading third-party dependencies.

·       Wrote E2E tests to allow automatic promotion from development environments to production.

·       APIs: Designed and implemented RESTful endpoints, gRPC protobufs and HTTP servers, for communication between internal microservices and tools; and for users e.g., to query CI builds based upon status.

·       Monitored services using logging, Prometheus, Grafana dashboards and ChatOps to notify developers of problems.

·       Team responsibilities include regular code review, design documentation, strategic planning; interviewing; mentoring new hires; delivering tutorials; a regular on-call support rota, raising incidents when necessary.

This role gave me insight into the complete software and systems stack of a growing investment fund of 14. Reporting to the CTO, I chose and tested technologies for new tasks; designed, developed and regularly deployed Python software into production, for use immediately by the front and back office; and analysed data to develop insights.

• Developed automated data collection, parsing, cleaning, analysis and reporting tools and pipelines in Python, generating daily reports and significantly improving efficiency for the operations team.
• Built databases (NoSQL, MongoDB) for financial and GeoJSON data.
• Collected and processed data (geolocation; prices; population; demographics) to provide insights into investments.
• Constructed probabilistic decision trees (Excel VBA) to track outcomes, ideas and projects.
• Wrote TypeScript/JavaScript to automate data processes with our financial portfolio provider.
• Constructed Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana visualisations, dashboards and queries to monitor logs.