gablaxian.com

Returned to an IC role to further grow my technical skills and lead a new Platform Enablement team to set best-practices for a more customer-centric Platform product. I spent my time:

• Writing new enablement and communication strategies for teams in Platform Engineering
• Planning and executing an organisation-wide feature rollout, using Windsurf and AI, impacting over 20 teams, achieving 0% disruption and 100% increase in adoption

This role was cut short due to layoffs.

Team: API

Led a team of 3-7 engineers responsible for the REST API Program and Webhooks products.

• Collaborated with Product management, customers and stakeholders to design and implement APIs, API standards and API tooling to deliver and iterate on a new REST API interface based on OpenAPI and JSON:API to the whole R&D organisation to become the default Snyk API.
• Assisted in the development of linting rules and documentation to improve the consistency of our APIs
• Developed, hosted and maintained a new API documentation platform, and later led the consolidation and migration of our API documentation systems into a central user documentation platform
• Hired and mentored an intern on their trajectory to a full-time associate engineer role.

Team: Snyk Apps/Partner Integrations

Took over management of two teams responsible for Snyk Apps and AWS and GCP Partner Integrations. Later, took on the REST API and Webhooks ownerships to further the Extensibility story at Snyk, enabling customers and partners to build securely and reliably on the Snyk Platform.

• Unified two teams into one and re-shaped the product vision
• Collaborated with Product management, Bizdev and partner solutions engineers to define and execute a roadmap to deliver our beta features, Snyk Apps, a Slack App integration and our AWS Partner Integrations as robust, scalable production-ready products.

Additional impact:

• Delivering business value aligned to the company goals in incremental slices using the Shape Up methodology.
• Providing team members with regular feedback, mentoring, and coaching.

Team: Enterprise

Started as employee 37 and watched Snyk grow to over 1500. I joined the team in charge of the SaaS app.

• Maintained the ExpressJS App
• Delivered performance improvements to improve the scalability of product features
• Built new product capabilities
• Re-built the project import flow in Vue, for improved user experience and performance
• Participated in on-call rotations, maintining and supporting production services and handling customer support tickets

Team: Governance

Seeded a new team responsible for the existing Reporting product

• Helped re-architect and deliver a new Reporting V2 product in Vue for improved user experience and performance and additional product features.
• Assisted in maintaining and improving the BigQuery data structures and ETL pipelines that powered the real-time reporting capabilities.

Team: API

After Snyk acquired a specialist third-party integrations company, I was once again asked to seed a new team in a newly formed Extensibility Group created to better enable customers and partners to build on top of the Snyk platform. My team was responsible for the new API Program and Webhooks product.

• Extracted the webhooks product from the monorepo to a new microservice, helping to improve the performance and scalability of webhooks and team velocity for feature development.
• Collaborated with select teams to deliver new APIs on the REST API to prove out the standards and tooling that would lay the foundation for how REST APIs were delivered throughout the rest of the organisation.
• Developed middleware, linters and generators to enable teams to build against the new REST API

Responsibilities included building pattern portfolios for clients, developing internal CMS-driven sites built on Craft for Clearleft itself and also their events, e.g. dConstruct, UX London, Ampersand and Leading Design.

Separate to building sites, I helped maintain Digital Ocean droplets for hosting our sites and projects along with building and maintaining custom PHP scripts that managed a local development environment using Vagrant, VirtualBox and Ubuntu and CI/CD deployments.

Through Clearleft I worked with such clients as: eLife, Penguin Random House, Wellcome Collection

I worked in a freelance capacity for anyone who needed an extra pair of hands for their projects.

During this time I worked with technologies such as PHP, Python, Ruby, JavaScript (including Canvas), CSS and HTML using frameworks like Wordpress, ExpressionEngine, Laravel, Magento, Joomla, Django, Ruby on Rails, jQuery and require.js

My work here covered a wide variety of roles. I started by building an internal Scheduling system to help manage the time of people in the Studio and supporting the product by creating Ad banners and HTML emailers for clients.

Later I moved on to join the rest of the small web team building recruitment systems for clients for the processing of job applications and CVs and their hosting requirements. I took Photoshop page designs and built them from scratch, using progressive enhancement to cater for less capable browsers which were typically built in Ruby on Rails, PHP and MySQL, HTML, CSS and JQuery.

Through SMRS, I’ve done work for clients such as Sky, Next, Chubb Security, HDNL and Skipton Building Society.

Joined a small recruitment company, Progressive Recruitment, who later released a newsletter and physical magazine.

The role covered developing both the recruitment company and the magazine’s websites and internal CRM, administering the Linux servers, various http servers, MySQL servers, the network and samba server. I also acted as advertising designer, technical journalist, computer technician and backup systems.