Robert Brown

Brainbox Digital (2012 - 2016)

Technical Director

Providing price-comparison APIs & Feeds, with bespoke Javascript widgets for publishers.

Daily processing of over 250 million products from over 10 providers across Europe and US/Canada. Utilising CPC and CPA from affiliate networks and other partners.

Constantly responsible for a scalable and resilient platform of ~100 servers handling millions of global search queries a day.

I successfully led Brainbox Digital through a period of business change between 2014 and 2016, developing a new diversified product set whilst deprecating old technology and solutions no longer suitable to the marketplace in which we operated, successfully overcoming challenges, both internally and externally.

My role as Technical Director also involved recruiting and managing a team of in-house developers to achieve their true potential whilst promoting from within. I also maintain relationships with outsourced teams where applicable.

Experience in sponsored listings, native advertising, and video advertising.

• Technical architect and product owner, driving innovation through technology.
• Developed cross-geo virtualised (Xen) platforms running MySQL, MongoDB, Solr, ElasticSearch (ELK), with Machine Learning.
• API and Feeds written in Perl, C, Node.js, with widgets in pure JS.
• Implemented Scrum and took role as scrum master, holding standups, reviews and retrospectives, with fortnightly sprints.
• Recruited and mentored a team of 5 developers, promoting from within.
• Recruited and managed an outsourced team across 7 countries for required manual work.

Venda (2012 - 2012)

Technical Team Lead

Providing bespoke ecommerce backend solutions to websites such as Boohoo, Tesco, TKMax, etc.

Resigned to focus on some start-up side projects.

• Orchestrated automated testing across multiple hosts, utilising MCollective, Chef, Gearman.
• Began work on implementing a new client (The U.S. Mint).

CV-Library.co.uk (2010 - 2012)

Development Manager

Online job board.

• Recruited, managed, and mentored a team of 5 developers.
• Re-factored legacy CGI scripts into Template::Toolkit and approximately 200 Moose libraries to model current business.
• Developed an XML API (Solr backend) for the iPhone and Android apps.
• Developed the front-end website and affiliated sites to search jobs and candidates.
• Integrated payment gateway under PCI compliance.
• Introduced Scrum project management methods such as daily stand-ups.

LOVEFiLM (2009 - 2010)

Catalogue Rearchitecture Team Lead

DVD rental service and digital streaming service, later acquired by Amazon.

• Headed up the catalogue re-architecture team to design and build a new framework to search and browse the LOVEFiLM catalogue.
• Implemented auto-complete with the Solr/memcached backend.

123-reg / WebFusion (2006 - 2009)

Development Manager

Hands-on development of the 123-reg domain registration and hosting service, developed the 123-reg API for all domain control.

Recruited and managed a team of 5 developers.

Day-to-day skills and experience:

• Perl, OO Perl, mod_perl
• Exim
• Bind
• Nagios
• CVS / Subversion
• Load Balancing
• FastCGI
• SOAP, XML::RPC, JSON::RPC::Server::CGI, JSON::RPC::Client, Digest::MD5, Template::Toolkit, Crypt::CBC, Time::HiRes

Accenture (2003 - 2006)

Analyst Programmer

Development and maintenance of C applications with SyBase, on HP-UX, for the National Insurance Recording system.

Castle Black Belt Academy, Sheffield, UK (2002 - 2003)

Martial Arts Instructor

Responsible for introducing new students to the club, and teaching several weekly sessions to all ages.

BT, Sheffield, UK (University Industrial Placement) (2000 - 2001)

Programmer

Built a new dev server on Sun Solaris including all required software including Apache and Oracle.

Developed C applications for a new billing system between BT and AT&T, utilising ProC and PL/SQL.