A brief history of me
Who am I?
My name is Daniel. I was born at the start of the 1980s in Manchester. I am the eldest of three childern. My wife and I married in 2011 and we have 2 children; a boy and a girl.
My career has been one of change and challenge. I have worked with a variety of different platforms, industries, and technologies. Each time I have learned something new and enhanced my knowledge and skills.
Throughout all my roles I have expended great effort to keep my technical skills up to date. I have found this has been most beneficial when leading teams as I am able to understand the problems at hand and offer stronger directions than I would have been able to do without.
I enjoy leading teams and dealing with fast moving problems. My recent roles have involved a lot of highly complex environments with exceptionally demanding customers. I have thrived in this environment and made a strong impact.
My work history
Director, Reliability Engineering
Mastercard (January 2019-Present)
I am responsible for the live and pre-production environments for Vocalink and Mastercard's New Payment Platforms - specifically for the Real-time and Batch payments.
My teams currently support 24/7 services in Europe, Thailand, Singapore, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, USA, and Peru. We are responsible for Level 2 and 3 live support, environment maintenance and build, member and industry test support, and post-incident technical reviews.
The technology stack is diverse and covers multiple domains.
Manager, Core Applications
Vocalink (October 2011 - September 2016)
I was responsible for the application support for the core applications of Bacs, Faster Payments, and Bankgirot.
We provided live support 24/7.
Team Leader, Monitise and LINK Back-office Applications
Vocalink (October 2008 - May 2010)
I was responsible for live support of the joint-venture with Monitise and the LINK back-office and settlement applications.
Java Developer
LINK (May 2005 - June 2007)
I worked on LINK back-office and settlement applications. Using Java, JBoss, Hibernate, and Oracle RDBMS.
Applications Developer
Trigold (May 2004 - October 2004)
At Trigold I worked on mortgage brokering software; mostly in Visual Basic but with some Java for the new version.
Applications Developer
Comreco Rail (February 2001 - August 2001)
At Comreco I worked on train planning software used by Railtrack. It was written in Visual Basic with an Oracle database.
Director, Business Operations
Vocalink (September 2016-January 2019)
My role in Business Operations was to lead the teams supporting Vocalink's core payment platforms. These are: Bacs, Faster Payments, Paym, Bankgirot, Fast-Cheque, and Payport.
These systems (with the exclusion of Bankgirot [Sweden]) underpin most of the interbank transactions in the UK. For example, Bacs process most salary, Direct Debit, and government benefit payments.
My teams were responsible for Level 2 and 3 support of the live services - 24/7. The SLAs were extremely tight and the pressure incredible high, due to the potential economic impact on the UK economy for any prolonged failure or outage.
Team Leader, Bankgirot and Euro Clearing Services
Vocalink (May 2010 - October 2011)
I was asked to relocate from Harrogate to the Dunstable datacentre to lead this team. The Bankgirot service was a new addition and was the first time a national payment service had been outsourced to another country (from Sweden to UK).
Mobile Banking Specialist/DBA
Vocalink (June 2007 - October 2008)
Following the merger with Voca, I was asked to help with the Monitise join-venture. I also took on responsibility for support of the LINK databases due to my experience with Oracle databases.
Senior Developer
Howells Associates (October 2004 - May 2005)
I worked on share-scheme software - in VB and Java.
Applications Developer
Elanders (June 2002 - May 2004
I developed catalogue management software using Visual Basic and Microsoft SQL Server.
My skills
Technical
Java
I have worked with Java for over 17 years. My experience covers all the common frameworks, such as Spring, Hibernate etc.
Golang
Several years ago I started using Golang to develop support utilities. I have found it to be a great language.
Unix
Linux and Solaris have been the main Operating Systems I have used in my career. In my personal life I have used Ubuntu as my daily-driver for 10 years, but lately I have switched to MacOS on M1.
Devops
The platforms I worked with have used Continous Testing and Deployment strategies - utilising such tools as: Chef, Jenkins, Flyway, Ansible
Leadership
Team management
Since 2008 I have had management roles covering small and large teams. I have been responsible for managers of managers. My roles have covered all aspects of management, including budgeting, restructuring, technical leadership, and man-management,
Mentoring
I enjoy help and watching people grow their careers and skills. Over the period of my career I have had the privilege to help many people along their path. I strongly believe in giving people a sense of purpose and a strong set of realistic career objectives.
Major incident command
Working with large-scale, financially-sensitive services has given me exposure to the most critical of applications. I have led the resolution of many major incidents, from initiation to root-cause identification. My input has stretched from customer-interaction through to fine technical detail.
My Certifications
Linkedin
Github
Email