Chris Wallace

A client-facing position and involved in all aspects of the software development lifecycle, responsible for managing a small on and offshore team of permanent and contract developers building and maintaining a Capital Gains Tax (CGT) Calculation and Reporting software used by Tier 1 financial organizations in both the UK and mainland Europe.

• Employed Agile methodologies to manage aggressive timelines and multiple deliverables of the flagship product’s, CGiX, annual release and client bespoke requirements. Weekly progress report and status updates provided to key stakeholders and other managers in the organization.
• Resourced and introduced a small QA team to capture and define test cases, system and regression test plans, and introduce an Automated Test Framework using Selenium.
• Worked with key stakeholders to define, shape and deliver a new product offering allowing diversification and additional revenue streams.
• Advocated, mentored and code reviewed adoption of SOLIDD principles and unit tests in the flagship product's legacy code-base.
• Implemented continuous integration and deployment system with Team Foundation Server (TFS) and TeamCity in order to automate and improve of software delivery.

Brought in for a short-term contract role to evaluate HelloU’s technology stack and assist their team with changing the underlining technology in order to support the new business direction. Supported the previous technology during the transformation.

• Successfully implemented a Wordpress site effectively allowing HelloU to triple their traffic at less than half their costs. Allowed the front-end developers to rapidly provide functionality without a lot of development effort or time. As well as enabled the content writers to add new posts without any involvement from the development team.
• Implemented continuous deployment system with Jenkins in order to automate and improve the process of software delivery. Provided structure and visibly into the development process using Kanban.

Managed a group of 9 developers, responsible for the technical leadership, stakeholder management, Scrum Master role and delivery of a Labour (HR & Rota) module of a SaaS product for the hospitality industry. Co-founded an initiative for the adoption of Agile methodologies and modern software practices such as TDD, BDD, automated testing and CI/CD across the technology division.

• Successfully championed with both technical and non-technical stakeholders the benefits of TDD and worked closely with the team to create a plan for adoption around one of the more problematic and difficult areas of code that included applying SOLID principles to create a loosely coupled application architecture, cross team resource up-skilling, group as well as peer code reviews, and progress reporting.
• Created two interdisciplinary project Scrum teams and a maintenance Kanban team on my second day to demonstrate and set realistic expectations of scope with the product management team. Worked closely by providing coaching and guidance with 13 other delivery teams to rollout Agile across the technology division.
• Setup a Continuous Integration and Delivery system using Jekins, msbuild and msdeploy which reduced the number of deployment defects to nearly zero and the UAT phase from 4 weeks to less than a week.

Responsible for the technical direction of an in-house web application framework for the development of dynamic websites, and web services. Managing a small group of developers in an Agile environment, built a back office system to manage the websites across 3 different product types and 17 different languages.

• Migrated the initial framework to ASP.NET MVC3 from WebForms allowing for the Design department to implement features requiring less custom code as well as increasing the flexibility for designs.
• Worked with business stakeholders to redevelop large sections of legacy systems to be more in line with business needs as well as providing a back office configuration tool to allow non-technical personnel to manage website functionality.
• Implemented a test environment for the QA department, custom build process to automated deployments as well as enforcing code quality standards within the development team.

Working mainly within the operations team, responsible for the stability and performance in the Windows Desktop Client, Corporate and Portal web sites as well as the backend services.

• Provided a high-level of professionalism and organization including taking ownership of a project which was slipping from its deadline, strongly advocating and getting adopted a ticket tracking system for defects and new feature requests, and working closely with the Support Team to resolve issues.
• Implemented a number of new features including NAS backup support in the Windows Client, complete white-labeling of the Windows Client as well as assisting with the UI in the Reseller’s Portal.
• Investigated and provided recommendations performance issues including inter-service communication as well as database load and optimizations.

Responsible for the underlying architecture and for managing a small team of full time developers, contractors and designers by employing agile methods and practices. Work closely with management, development and technical leads in other departments and external partners to serve as a technical adviser providing a development perspective on requirements, and to deliver solutions quickly and in line with business goals.

• Supported approximately 50% of all companywide traffic which accounts for upwards of 60% of all gross profit. Challenged with supporting double the traffic capacity, originally forecasted to be reached by end of year, successfully planned and lead an aggressive migration and expansion of infrastructure between data centers in 2 months.
• Led and key contributor to the vision of a real-time traffic analysis and decision engine to detect click fraud and undesirable traffic for impression based ads. The system also allows both outside partners and proprietary web site framework to provide customized user experience based on geo-location, web browser and plug-in information, historical user actions, IP address allocation and ranges, and traffic pattern signatures.
• Anticipated the need for, provided the feature set, designed and managed development for a Partner Management System, which allows external partners and internal employees to manage site configuration and access real-time statistics, daily diagnostic and financial reports. The system was integral part in supporting 3 times the number of partners after 6 months than originally budgeted for the year.
• Led development of a site builder for proprietary web site framework allowing designers, editors and writers to create dynamic web sites with minimal intervention from the development groups.
• Requested to remain an integral member of the team as a Senior Developer to provide direction and product enhancements after relocating to the United Kingdom.

Managing a small team consisting of full time employees and contractors using SCRUM principles and methods as well as being hands-on to deliver solutions quickly and effectively in order to provide and test new business models and ideas.

• Architected and developed a highly scalable, high availability platform for client-facing web sites (sustaining 40,000 hits per 5 minutes) and back office systems (approximately a terabyte of new data incrementally every 6 months) by leveraging Microsoft solutions from C# and the .NET framework to SQL Server 2005, SQL Server Reporting Services and SQL Server Analysis Services.
• Worked alongside managers and technical leads of other divisions to integrate new ideas and methods supporting company-wide initiatives; liaise with external partners to provide technical guidance and assistance with scalability.
• Advocated for and designed systems to assist in automation of traffic analysis, alerting to KPIs and providing potential areas for expansion in order to provide daily action items as well as summary views for Web Masters and the Search Engine Marketing team to permitting them support a larger number of web sites.

Worked in conjunction with team leads to provide technical and feature development guidance for an online local search engine (www.truelocal.com).

• Initiated, developed and documented a local search framework using an open-source information retrieval library in C# to produce a highly scalable and cost effective solution over the existing implementation using MS SQL Server 2000 Full Text search.
• Personally requested by the CTO out of more than 30 developers to work on a highly confidential project; delivered a highly available and modular solution in a very aggressive timeframe.
• Continued troubleshooting and resolution on company-wide development issues requiring escalation above individual development teams.
• Provided a leadership and mentoring role while defining the solution architecture for an online web search engine with a local bias (www.goto.com).

Provided high-availability front-end web controls to be employed on over 300 web sites with over 35 million unique visitors a month.

• Analyzed, designed, developed, documented and tested database driven front-end web controls ranging from content management to an advertising delivery system using C#, ASP.NET and ADO.NET for high traffic sites whose uptime was directly related to company revenue.

Provided internal software development and software customizations.