Andrew Beacock
Startup/Scaleup CTO | Fractional CTO | Tech Consultancy
As a senior engineering leader, I’ve nearly 30 years of software development experience including leading development teams, line-managing squads, and solving many varied business problems using my technical skills. Excellent at building relationships and communicating effectively as well as explaining complex technical issues to non-technical people, I’m a massive fan of using analogies to aid understanding.
I’ve followed waterfall, agile and everything-in-between methodologies, as well as being an advocate of unit testing, test driven development & pair programming. I spent a decade building telecoms carrier-grade resilient server-side mobile solutions, and over a decade building secure, fast, scalable web applications for the financial industry. I led & managed a 50-strong development team at Very migrating their massive e-commerce monolith to microservices, was CTO for a PropTech scaleup, then CTO for a LegalTech startup and now I’m working in the AI space at Fuzzy Labs.
I’m passionate about hiring, onboarding & growing tech teams, supporting my engineers development as well as providing technical leadership, mentoring & coaching on software development best practices. I love serverless & cloud computing and was a member of OWASP to help promote secure coding practices. Extremely comfortable working remotely having spent half of my career working from home! I’m active in the North West meetup scene, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have been a guest on a number of panels and several live webinars over the last few years. (For details and links to the recordings please see the ‘Featured’ section on my LinkedIn profile.)
Interim Head of Engineering – Fuzzy Labs (Manchester)
July 2024 to present (contract)
- “you’re officially having more impact in the course of a week than your predecessor had in 4 months” - Matt Squire (CTO) of Fuzzy Labs
Chief Technology Officer – Aturna LLC (remote)
February 2022 to June 2024
Responsible for all aspects of technology, engineering & product at Aturna. We’ve built a client-facing US legal services platform currently offering affordable wills, powers of attorney and health care proxies, backed by lawyers.
The engineering team are based in the UK, but the rest of the company are in the US, most in upstate New York, so I’m very familiar with communicating and collaborating remotely with teams spread across time zones.
The platform runs on GCP with a React/Typescript frontend, Scala/Akka backend and a Postgres database. We use Cloud Run & Pub/Sub services (IaC via Terraform), Firebase for frontend hosting & auth and Stripe for card payments.
Following agile product development methodologies (utilising JIRA’s Kanban board) we perform releases at least weekly, with a very high confidence level due to PR code reviews, extensive unit, integration, and end-to-end tests - we’ve had just a couple of minor post-release issues in the last two years.
- Took sole responsibility of the entire GitHub-based codebase & platform in less than 6 weeks of starting due to the outsourced team being rolled off, hired two excellent engineers within the first month.
- Defined annual technical strategy and quarterly goals, as well as being responsible for the product roadmap
- Monthly company-wide engineering progress presentations, sharing tech achievements in non-technical terms
- Built solid relationships with all members of the organisation enabling fast and effective collaboration
- Coached a lawyer over a period of 6 months to transition into my Head of Product
- Outsourced the IT support & cybersecurity training, negotiating a very favourable contract
- Streamlined the CircleCI-based build/deployment process to speed up deployments and reduce risks
- Setup proactive monitoring & alerting via GCP & Slack to ensure early warning about potential issues
- Introduced Sleuth for release tracking, notifications, and DORA metrics (frequency, lead time, failure rate, MTTR)
- Added Microsoft Clarity for click tracking, hot spots & rage clicks to support a data-driven product roadmap
Chief Technology Officer – Canopy (remote)
March 2021 to February 2022
Responsible for all aspects of engineering at Canopy, a FinTech scaleup, from roadmap & strategic planning, quarterly OKR goals as well as day-to-day engineering management. Leadership of two off-shore outsourced teams and a small UK remote engineering team (total of 20 developers). I perform weekly 1-2-1s with my small UK team, I run a cross- team daily standup to ensure alignment across the teams as well wearing many other hats due to us being a scaleup.
The platform is a microservice-based architecture (60 microservices) running in AWS, written in TypeScript, JavaScript and React Native. Hosted in GitHub, built via CircleCI & AWS CodePipeline. Our data lake is hosted in GCP with BigQuery, and reports & dashboards built in Metabase.
- Defined Q2’s Tech OKRs in my third week
- Hired a UAT QA engineer in my first month to ‘own’ quality and ensure consistent testing approaches across teams l Improved communication & sharing in the morning standup by showing empathy and a ‘no blame’ culture
- Increased collaboration between outsourced teams with shared presentations, joint architecture workshops
- Decreased release risk by encouraging better deployment planning and release communications
- Introduced sprint retros for one of the teams (the other already did them)
- Smashed our Q2 OKRs including cost saving on AWS (target: 5% → actual: 25%)
- Added monitoring and alerting to the AWS estate to ensure early warning of potential issues
- NFT environment built and load tested to ensure capacity and growth
- Introduced Sleuth & LinearB tools for DORA/Accelerate and developer metrics
- Turned the release culture around from broken chaotic releases to multiple releases a week with no issues
Software Engineering Manager – The Very Group (mostly remote)
January 2020 to March 2021
Responsible for the 40+ frontend & backend engineers who develop and maintain the Very.co.uk website and Android & iOS apps, as well as Littlewoods & Littlewoods Ireland websites & apps. Working in the ‘Spotify model’ of tribes & squads I had 8 direct reports (6 squad leads and 2 tech leads). Operating at a tribe level, I fed into the tech & product roadmaps for the tribe, working closely with the chief architect, Head of Product and Head of Delivery.
Very were in the process of migrating from a large legacy java-based e-commerce monolith (Oracle ATG on WebLogic) to AWS-based polyglot microservices: Java (Spring Boot) & Golang backend services with React & Node.js micro- frontends. Using numerous AWS services including ECR & ECS, Lambda, DynamoDB, EventBridge, AppMesh & Fargate. Code is stored in BitBucket (Git) and services are deployed via CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins.
- Established a skills matrix and created performance documents for each developer, set up 1-2-1s with my directs
- Worked with UX & performance teams to ensure an aligned ‘organic migration’ tech roadmap - ‘little & often’
- Worked with another tribe’s Head of Tech to review company tech career ladder, writing job descriptions & adverts
- Interview feedback: “he said the whole process has been one of the best he has been involved in & really enjoyable”
- Turned our ‘new starter’ onboarding process around from a few days to a few hours (kit setup, network access, etc.)
- Contractor onboarding feedback - “well to be fair its been the smoothest onboarding so far, and I’ve been on a few, good goal to aspire towards hopefully that’s some reassurance that you guys are going the right way!”
- Formed a working group to ensure a better developer experience: high powered laptops, full admin rights, etc.
- Pushed production support down to the squads to ensure that root causes could be investigated and fixed
- Organised a multi-disiplined team to investigate two key problem areas that had existed for over 3 weeks, found the cause on day 2, got full solution mapped out on day 3, and was in production and resolved on day 4
- Reduced the time taken to log and submit engineer on-call & overtime claims from hours to a few minutes
- Direct report feedback - “To be honest you have done more in this space than 3 previous managers combined”
- Internal recuitment team feedback - “Andrew was really sharp at coming back on feedback within 24 hours on workable, and allowing us to schedule in 30 min intro interviews directly into his calendar, which gives candidates a great experience. X was hired within 2 weeks as a result of this.”
- Researched & introduced MS Teams ‘Shifts’ for the whole tribe to track holidays, days off, self-isolation, sickness
- Created screencasts to detail the process of setting up Shifts, these have since been shared with the whole company
- Founding member & now sole organiser of the Liverpool Tech Talks meetup group
Senior Software Engineer / Team Leader – Hansard International (remote)
May 2008 to December 2019
Led a team of five senior developers responsible for the design, development & deployment of award-winning financial web applications, allowing clients & brokers to self-manage their life assurance policies and perform fund management. Good at analysing incomplete requirements and working closely with numerous departments to ensure the applications fulfil the needs of the business. Excellent at explaining complex technical issues to non-technical people and communicating effectively whilst being home-based. Extremely comfortable managing my workload & priorities having worked remotely for over a decade (Hansard are based on the Isle of Man).
The enterprise web applications are developed using JSP, JSTL, HTML, CSS & jQuery on the front-end with Spring MVC Java services running on Tomcat accessing Oracle databases. Bootstrap, AJAX & JSON are used to create mobile and tablet-friendly web applications which are secure, scalable, fast and easy to use. Code is developed using IntelliJ IDEA, built using Maven & Ant, continuous integration via Jenkins & version controlled in Subversion & Git.
- Built an ‘Online Fund Switching’ application which has created 150,000+ switch instructions to a value of over £1bn
- Designed the organic replacement of a large legacy client-facing web portal using a proxy delegation model
- Highly knowledgeable about Spring & Hibernate having used numerous versions of Spring (2,3,4 & Boot) as well as using both XML and annotation-based configuration, including a published article in the Open Source Journal
- Member of the security team responsible for security & code reviews including penetration testing using BurpSuite to search for XSS & SQL injection vulnerabilities as well as using dictionary, enumeration and fuzz attacks
- Develop with a security-centric approach using client & server validation, data sanitisation & escaping (OWASP)
- Stepped up as team manager providing stability & direction whilst my manager was on an extended leave of absence
- Knowledge expert on unit & integration testing using TDD, JUnit and mocking frameworks (EasyMock, Mockito)
- Researched and documented the use of Ansible for automated, reproducible deployments across a number of servers
- Experienced with the entire Atlassian suite: JIRA, Confluence, Fisheye & Crucible
- Our systems won ‘Best Digital Proposition’ award at the International Advisor Global Financial Services Awards ‘19
Software Developer / Team Leader – 2ergo Ltd. (Rawtenstall)
November 2002 to May 2008
Led a team of five software developers creating Java mobile applications. Estimated & allocated tasks and reported progress to the product management board. Responsible for the design, development & deployment of applications powering mobile services such as SMS chat, text voting, ringtone & wallpaper subscription services & various WAP/mobile internet sites.
Applications were developed using agile methodologies in Java using Spring & Hibernate to access Oracle, MySQL & Postgres databases. Team advisor for good OO & Java design, refactoring, unit testing & server configuration & deployment. Systems administrator for the CVS & Subversion code repositories.
- Used a JMS-based manager/worker architecture to increased SMS throughput from 8 msgs/sec to over 150 msgs/sec
- Migrated the deployment environment from a Resin server to a load-balanced cluster of Apache/Tomcat servers
- Developed a Java Servlet/JSP web framework (utilising XHTML & WURFL) for creating mobile internet sites
- Created mobile versions of the Multimap & Rightmove websites, Rightmove won a Vodafone Award for Innovation
- Decreased the number of production bugs with the introduction of unit testing and test-driven development (TDD)
- Designed & prototyped a J2ME application framework for mobile payments (later patented by 2ergo)
- Joined Sun’s JSR Expert Group for two JSRs - Server API for Mobile Services (212) & J2ME Payment API (229)
- Researched and documented the use of Ruby, Capistrano, Apache Proxy Balancer, Mongrel & Mongrel Cluster to provide a stable clusterable production environment in which to run Ruby on Rails applications
Principal Software Engineer / Architect / Team Leader – Nokia (Boston, MA, USA)
October 2000 to October 2002
Responsible for development team management and leadership for mobile internet services. Managed six senior software engineers creating MMS-related web & WAP services developed in Java. The MMS services were based on J2EE & Struts running on Sun Microsystems hardware using BEA’s Weblogic Application Server and an Oracle 9i database. Technical architect for Multimedia Messaging (MMS) and mobile services, including software architecture and design, clustering and scalability, and fault-tolerance for large-scale carrier-class systems.
- Researched & prototyped key future technologies including Multimedia Messaging, Web Services, and J2ME
- Led the development of an MMS SDK, investigating API versioning, pluggable components & framework design
- Developed a complex set of Ant build scripts to reduce duplication when building JAR, WAR & EAR archives
- Presented a session on “Ant” to approximately 200 members of the New England Java Users Group
- Instigated & led the introduction of unit testing (using JUnit) to approximately 60 developers
- Harmonised two opposing engineering teams (Boston & Helsinki) to produce a 5-year product strategy roadmap by organising & leading face-to-face workshops & follow-up teleconferences
- Selected to be a member of the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) and Nokia’s Web Services Architecture Forum
- Attended Nokia’s 2-week intensive management program for employees with potential to be effective leaders
- Gave a number of internal technical presentations to approximately 60 team members
- Founding member of the New England Mobile Java Special Interest Group
Software Engineer / Team Leader – IntervoiceBrite Ltd. (Manchester)
April 1998 to September 2000
Responsible for designing & team leading a J2EE-based “unified messaging system” that provided web & WAP access to voicemails, faxes, & emails. It included a ‘Text-To-Speech’ email reading service & message filtering rules stored in an LDAP directory. It was designed to allow several million subscribers to access it, using a highly scalable & fault- tolerant architecture based on iPlanet application server products & a Sybase database running on Sun Netra hardware.
Responsible for developing, installing & configuring mobile services for BT Cellnet (now O2). These included their voicemail system and “TrafficLine” - a mobile location-based road traffic news service (resold as “AA Vodafone Roadwatch”). Products were developed in C running on Solaris along with an in-house IVR language running on QNX.
- Introduced the MVC JSP/Servlet architecture to separate business logic from presentation (both HTML & WML)
- Participated in Ericsson’s beta exam program achieving ‘Ericsson Certified WAP Application Developer’ status
- Received a letter of recognition from BT Cellnet for single-handily producing the TrafficLine product
Software Developer – Softlok International Ltd. (Bolton)
October 1995 to March 1998
Responsible for developing & providing technical support for Windows drivers of software security dongles creating linkable stubs for many varied languages & compiler versions.
- Developed low-level device drivers & TSRs (in C/C++ & 80x86 assembly) for Windows NT, 95, 3.x, & MS-DOS
- Developed Java 1.0 classes using JNI to hook into the C drivers
- Merged multiple codebases into one API which supported both 16 & 32 bit Windows drivers
- Designed, developed & maintained the company website (with a secure area for the latest drivers)
Education
1992 to 1995: B.Eng. (Hon.) Electronic Engineering, UMIST (University of Manchester)