DAMIEN RYAN

• Scaled engineering department to deliver real-time machine learning platform for world’s largest payment processors and banks.
• Increased the size of the engineering department by 50% to 120 people through sustainable hiring practices across development, quality, and supporting functions.
• Reorganised the engineering department from functional, siloed teams to build out focused groups of cross-functional teams that can operate independently on platform, solution, and delivery technologies.
• Built technology strategy to align with structure to move product architecture from distributed monolith to independent platform and solution components that teams can change independently and moved to cloud first approaches.
• Built out the engineering management team, governance, and metrics that enable leaders to work together with alignment and co-operation

Responsible for department size 120 people – primary management focus on team of directors and deputy directors.

• Built out the engineering operations function, recruiting and developing release management and release engineering teams to plan and deliver business value predictably and safely to high quality
• Developed and ran urgent customer defect calls, working with engineering teams to understand issues and plan workarounds and getting them live
• Built out delivery engineering function to bring continuous value to delivery teams who work closely with customers

Responsible for 30 people across quality, technical communications, release engineering and release management teams - primary focus on team leads.

• Ran operations of Featurespace engineering, ensuring teams produce high-quality software on time, sanely and safely
• Developed and rolled out triage processes to reduce burden of customer and delivery support on engineers, ensuring customers get the help they need while still progressing development of the ARIC platform
• Created centralised engineering handbook as a single point for all department information.

• Brought planning cadence down from three months to two weeks, increasing feedback loops and ensuring on-time external release of the ARIC platform
• Increased testing coverage of pre-integrated code by introducing verification testing before changes to code get introduced to mainline, reducing schedule slippage
• Managed engineering-side visibility of feature roadmap, working with Product and Programme Management and delivery teams to ensure on-time integrations with customer systems.

• Implemented build and release processes (Integration branches, automated component builds, within component validation) to empower developers and reduce bottlenecks in delivery pipeline
• Built a small, but dedicated team of engineers to provide global coverage for all four concurrent release vehicles of three products
• Working closely with QA, PM, and Development, released multiple, shippable products to the business, weekly, without fail as well as presenting regularly on release status and health as part of the Engineering and Product Leadership teams
• Implemented Continuous Build system globally using Jenkins, Job-DSL, and IncrediBuild, reducing developer wait time from two hours to forty-five minutes
• Designed build information system (using Postgres, Flask, and Alembic) to link to all information from QA and PM, allowing anyone in the company to track a given build number to the code changes in that build.

• Managed build and release pipeline from test to delivery to operations teams ensuring that testing and deployment was smooth and error free
• Defined and scheduled releases for internal live environments and aided customer integrations
• Designed and enforced release management processes and functioned as an interface between development and infrastructure teams
• Managed, and automated build and release processes for several web applications in a Windows Server environment using Windows PowerShell, Team Foundation Server, Visual Studio Database Deployment Engine, and WiX
• Administered a Team Foundation Server 2010 build and CM environment, defined release and branching strategies, and implemented continuous delivery techniques where possible.

• Managed integrations to and builds of development feature branches for a mobile telephone operating system
• Looked after branch health and ensured that code was stable
• Functioned as gatekeeper between twelve development branches and the main code line ensuring all integrations were built, tested for stability, and that all defects marked as fixed had actually been addressed
• Developed code churn metrics to provide supporting information for the Motorola quality team.

• Responsible for providing nightly builds of desktop and server scientific modelling software to development and QA teams, administering VSS and CVS configuration management systems, build and test machines, and supporting developers in their efforts to track down code changes responsible for build breaks
• Developed build tools for automation of nightly builds for Materials Science, Cheminformatics, and Life Sciences products built in various combinations of C++, Fortran, and Java.

• Bug analysis and maintenance of the build system and Orbix C++ source
• Implemented unified processes for product release throughout the Orbix Generation 3 group
• Team Mentor on the Orbix Product Team with a secondary role maintaining the Orbix Names Service.