John Sutherland

john@sneeu.com / +44 7776 055 955

I am an engineering manager & technical lead with over 15 years of industry experience in scaling software and teams in fast growing environments.

Employment

Lead Engineer at StarStock, November 2019–Present

StarStock is a marketplace to store, buy, and sell sports cards. As the first engineering hire I was responsible for setting the technical direction and developing the first version of our product.

Since we launched the MVP of starstock.com I have focused on scaling the platform which currently manages 50K registered users and has $500K/month in sales and growing the engineering team to 10, all while we continue to launch new products.

Our back-end GraphQL API and internal tools are built using Python, Django, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Elasticsearch while our front-end is JavaScript & React. All of this is deployed to Heroku and AWS using GitHub actions for CI/CD.

Code is well tested and peer-reviewed before merging. We run 2-week sprints with estimation, planning, and retrospectives every sprint.

Director of Engineering at Care Sourcer, July 2018–November 2019

At Care Sourcer I was responsible for the technical direction of the engineering team working on a marketplace to make finding care, either at-home or in a care-home easier.

The product was built of three main applications: a medium-sized Ruby on Rails web-app, a legacy PHP code-base, and a newer Gatsby application focused on SEO. All of these used various AWS services including Elastic Beanstalk, RDS, SQS, and S3.

Reporting to the CTO, I line-managed & mentored 5 members of the engineering team and worked on the engineering career-ladder.

Director of Engineering at FanDuel, February 2013–July 2018

FanDuel is a daily fantasy sports company which operates paid contests where users win millions of dollars every week. During my time at FanDuel I worked on a range of projects including live-scoring, user authentication, and data pipelining & warehousing using a variety of Python, Django, Redis, Apache Hive, AWS EMR, and AWS Redshift.

Later, as the technical lead in a cross-functional team of around 20, I lead the team to successfully integrate a third-party digital marketing platform using AWS Lambda and DynamoDB, several marketing partnerships, and the replatforming of our payments infrastructure handling millions of dollars each day.

Finally as a Director of Engineering I was responsible for the line-management of around 20 engineers, which involved weekly 1:1s, career development, mentoring, on-boarding and hiring.

Software Developer at Administrate, August 2012–February 2013

At Administrate I worked between a green-field Learning Management System built with Python and Flask and maintenance on their legacy platform.

Technical Co-founder at Loud Street, April 2010–August 2012

At Loud Street I was one half of the company where we created two products: Bloop, an app to “increase serendipity at events” by showing attendees the profiles of similarly interested attendees; and Eventasaurus, an app to help people organise and promote events across social media. Both products used Python, Django, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, and celery.

Software Developer at Line Digital, April 2008–April 2010

Line Digital was a digital marketing agency. While there I worked with a range of clients including Red Driving School, The Edinburgh International Film Festival, GEO Foundation, and Aegon.

Software Developer at OpenText, November 2007–April 2008

At OpenText I worked on a library of user-interface components using Java and Google Web Toolkit.

Software Developer at Mercurytide, May 2005–November 2007

Mercurytide was a web development agency. I worked with a range of clients including Scottish Widows, Standard Life, LettingWeb, and Faithful+Gould. I use a variety of Java, Python, and PHP.

Intern Developer at Sun Microsystems, July 2003–June 2004

Between my third and final years at university I was an intern at Sun Microsystems in Colorado where I worked on internal reporting tools.

Education

BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, 2000–2005.

Personal

Along side my work-life I am dad to 2 primary-school aged kids, a mediocre guitar player, and a hill runner.