Simon Drake

Senior Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer with 10 years of experience, specialising in building resiliant and highly availably backend systems. Proven track record of picking up new technologies with ease, and leading the technical delivery of complex and critical services.

Work Experience

  • Senior Backend Software Engineer at Splunk

    — present
    • Tech Lead for a distributed team of engineers across multiple timezones
    • Subject Matter Expert for a critical service, utilising the Kubernetes Operator Pattern, which facilitates the orchestration of services that make up $2 billion ARR
    • Developed a long term vision, demonstrating how we can vastly increase developer velocity and reduce service outages/bugs
    • Led automation initiatives that have resulted in savings of $2 million a year on cloud costs
    • Implemented automation that has resulted in a reduction of hundreds of hours of manual TOIL
    • Go Subject Matter Expert that works across the business to ensure adherence best practices

  • Senior Full Stack Developer at The Workshop

    —
    • Led the migration of core microservices from Node.js to Go, for increased performance and stability
    • Led the development of a highly scalable and resilient platform that handled millions of requests a day
    • Implemented a new API design using gRPC and grpc-gateway
    • Key individual in the development of the React frontend

  • Senior Developer at MMT Digital

    —
    • Working with a leading comparison site, I led the transition them from a monolithic C# architecture to a Node JS microservice architecture
    • Implemented standard testing approaches (TDD) and frameworks (Mocha, Chai, NYC), Docker boilerplates, Git best practices and created stand utilities for use across multiple microservices to avoid duplication and assist with future maintenance
    • Rapidly learning new technologies that I hadn’t used before (e.g. Docker)

  • Full Stack Software Developer at Blue Chip

    —
    • Responsible for the development and testing of five micro-services and a frontend
    • Automated the migration of the database technology from RethinkDB to MongoDB
    • Converted the frontend from Angular 1 to React
    • Subject Matter Expert for the businesses reporting requirements, using Crystal Reports and Sisense