Jonathan Pearce
Exmouth,Devon
Summary
Diligent and competent Lead Systems Engineer with proven experience in architecting, evolving, and delivering performant, resilient, secure, and scalable solutions to support large scale critical services both in development and in current live use.
Focused on the continuous improvement of systems by means of a solid understanding of quality engineering across the full stack of components that make for a successful project.
Enjoys mentoring, swarming, and knowledge sharing sessions with people, listening to different points of view and exploring all options available.
Relishes complex problems and enjoys working with others, drawing on a whole raft of proven experience in multiple technologies; Github actions, API Gateway, Lambda, Event Bridge, IaC, Python, Data Storage, AWS X-Ray, Cloudwatch.
Embraces the fact that technology is constantly evolving and enjoys exploring new concepts and ideas, and applies new technologies to existing services, keeping things current and improving the service.
Overview
27
27
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work history
Lead Systems Engineer
NHS England
Exeter, Deveon
09.2022 - Current
- Providing technical and engineering leadership in the design and development of a total rewrite to a large-scale 24/7 operational NHS national critical service (Directory of Services - DoS).
- Using modern serverless technologies and improved development and delivery patterns to enable rapid, safe, and secure realisation of new features and resolution of current pain points for users of the system.
- The rewrite consists of an uplifting across multiple areas of concern which include a restructuring of the underlying data model and the technology in which the data model is held, as well as a complete overhaul of the management of the code base, branching stratagies, development processes, and authentication model.
- It also involves a move away from the Texas platform (a multi-tenanted AWS platform hosting multiple services) into our own AWS accounts.
Senior Systems Engineer (DoS Team)
NHSD
Exeter, Devon
01.2022 - 09.2022
- Responsible for the maintenance and continued running of a large-scale 24/7 operational NHS national critical service (Directory of Services - DoS). The service is key to clinicians, 111/999 call handlers, and other critical healthcare services in finding the most appropriate services for patients in emergency situations.
- Improved development and deployment processes by implementing automation of infrastructure and by the gradual migration of build and deployment code to fit with the UEC standard devops model.
- Clearly defines the technical direction of the service, being involved in key design decisions, workshops, and swarming sessions concerning the technical modernisation of the platform with supplier IBM teams.
- Clearly communicates technical direction by means of road maps, Jira tickets, and progress updates across teams.
- Established clear channels of communications between the teams setting clear expectations for the technical and functional assurance of key deliverables for the safe delivery of the deliverables into the live service.
- Removes blockages for the team by being the main point of contact for deployment and infrastructure knowledge.
- Ensures the team is correctly resourced by highlighting resource and skills gaps, and proactively being involved in recruiting processes and knowledge sharing sessions.
- Ensures the team has the environments needed to deliver enhancements at the expected rate by empowering the team to instigate the creation of additional environments when needed (such as the 2nd performance environment)
- Identified cost savings of £4k per month by switching off environments outside of working hours when not in use. This activity is currently being implemented by the team as an automated process.
Senior Systems Engineer (Tech Strat)
NHSD
Exeter
05.2021 - 12.2021
- Heavily involved in the design and implementation of a database migration solution to upgrade the database underpinning a large-scale critical national system.
- Clearly Presented two different approaches to the DoS and Service Management teams, highlighting important factors that should be considered in making the choice, such as: service downtime, stress and pressure during migration for the team, ease of migration, backup and recovery options, time for the migration
- Hands-on involvement in terraforming and automating the migration as far as possible, ensuring consistency and repeatability of execution across environments and greatly reducing risk of manual error.
- Ensured that monitoring and alerting was in place so problems could be seen before they became issues. away if problems started to occur. The monitoring of WAL log build up during DMS replication is an example of this.
- Involved in the design and creation of recovery plans at various stages of the migration.
- Involved in the creation of detailed run books that were carefully tested in several environments. Organised sessions with the team to perform dry runs of the migration, to share understanding of the process.
Acting Tech Lead (Service Finder)
NHSD
Exeter, Devon
03.2019 - 05.2021
- Responsible for the running, maintenance and enhancement of a national critical system for 111 operators
- Led in the engineering of a new micro-service to perform fuzzy searches against searchable NHS services, involving designing of the infrastructure, API, datastore model, ETL processes, system logging, and monitoring.
- Presented solutions to key stakeholders in show and tells, giving regular progress updates.
- Performed swarming sessions and workshops to disseminate knowledge to the team
- Actively involved in requirements capture and ticket refinement sessions so that each ticket can be implemented by any member of the team.
- Involved in recruiting new members to the team and ensuring that they had everything they needed to hit the ground running
Senior Developer (Texas)
NHSD
Exeter, Devon
03.2018 - 03.2019
- Migrated the BS-Select live service onto the cloud platform.
- Worked with members of the BS-Select team to have all pipelines and code in place required for the migration to the cloud.
- Fully hands-on in the creation of terraform, K8s deployment scripts, containerisation of the application components (docker), migration into an RDS Postgres database.
- Involvement for several months in guiding and training the team on how to use the new cloud based technologies, providing sessions and workshops in the areas of infrastructure as code and K8s deployments.
- Played a key role in investigating technologies such as cluster and pod autoscaling, and in the implementation of the Texas common pipeline code.
Senior Developer (Otter)
NHSD
Exeter, Devon
01.2017 - 03.2019
- Responsible for the maintenance and enhancements required to a Java Springboot API known as 'Sample Tracking'.
- Worked alongside developers from Oxford to develop and deliver enhancements.
- Made regular site visits to go through designs and proposed implementations of key requirements.
- Participated in presenting a two day training course with 20 members of staff in GEL for the project, to build their understanding of how the system worked from both a functional and technical perspective.
- Took on responsibility for the delivery of releases to GEL in the closing months of the project.
- Designed and developed a standalone API (EPS API) to act as facade fronting up and combining results from two NHS APIs to provide required information of services that can offer an electronic prescription service to clients.
- Involved in the successful migration of the EPS API onto the cloud environment. The API is still very much in live use and handles an average of 80,000 requests per day.
Senior Developer (Satellite Comms)
CGI
Leatherhead, Surrey
09.1998 - 12.2016
- Worked with Java Spring applications which monitored and allowed the configuration of encryption keys for communications between military satellites and ground equipment.
- Development of code based on pre-defined requirements, unit testing of the code, and a part in integration testing.
Education
Bachelor of Science - Mathematics And Computer Science (2.1)
University of Surrey
Guildford06.1998
Skills
- AWS technologies (including: RDS, Dynamo, Athena, Open Search, Lambda, API Gateway, Cognito)
- Python
- K8s
- Docker
- Terraform
- CI/CD pipelines, Jenkins, Github actions
- Quality Engineering
Certification
AWS Advanced Architecting Course
AWS Solutions Architect (Certification in progress)
Timeline
Lead Systems Engineer
NHS England
09.2022 - Current
Senior Systems Engineer (DoS Team)
NHSD
01.2022 - 09.2022
Senior Systems Engineer (Tech Strat)
NHSD
05.2021 - 12.2021
Acting Tech Lead (Service Finder)
NHSD
03.2019 - 05.2021
Senior Developer (Texas)
NHSD
03.2018 - 03.2019
Senior Developer (Otter)
NHSD
01.2017 - 03.2019
Senior Developer (Satellite Comms)
CGI
09.1998 - 12.2016
Bachelor of Science - Mathematics And Computer Science (2.1)
University of Surrey