Dave Wilson

Engineering ManagerCAVU

Apr 2023 - Present Manchester, UK

In my role as Engineering Manager, I successfully led and mentored multiple developers across several pods, overseeing their professional growth. My role extended to strategic resourcing, where I played a pivotal role in recruitment initiatives and internal movements to ensure we had a effectively resources pods for the work in progress.

In collaboration with the Heads of Product and Product Owners, I actively contributed to the planning and sizing of future projects, aligning development efforts with overarching business goals. This included fostering efficient workflows and seamless cross-team collaboration to avoid unnessesary duplication of effort.

Recognizing the importance of addressing live issues promptly, I introduced innovative processes that significantly improved response times and communication channels. This proactive approach not only enhanced the team's ability to troubleshoot and resolve issues swiftly but also contributed to an overall improvement in end user satisfaction.

In addition to these achievements, I implemented a comprehensive onboarding process for new developers, ensuring a smooth integration into the team and expediting their contribution to ongoing projects. Moreover, I played a key role in refining Confluence documentation and development processes, establishing a foundation for consistent and high-quality development practices across multiple teams. My commitment to excellence and process improvement played a pivotal role in fostering a collaborative and results-driven engineering culture.

Tech Stack Managed: .NET Core (C#), PHP (Laravel), AWS, SQL, Dynamo DB, Vue Js, Terraform, Jira

Technical LeadCAVU

Dec 2022 - Apr 2023 | 4 Months Manchester, UK

I started at CAVU as Tech Lead for the newly formed Growth pod, handling the expansion and development of a newly created platform as well and line managing several developers across multiple disciplines

I was also been involved heavily in recruitment of Mid and Senior Level .Net Developers.

Tech Stack Managed: .NET Core (C#), PHP (Laravel), AWS, SQL, Dynamo DB, Vue Js, Terraform, Jira

Technical LeadTopcashback

Jul 2017 - Sep 2022 | 5 Years, 2 Months Bolton, UK

During my time as Technical Lead at Topcashback I have managed 2 development teams starting in Business Critical and moving to International, the latter managing Microservices for the global Topcashback Sites.

Whilst in Business Critical I helped grow the team from a small team of 4 mainly junior developers to a team of 10 developers of varying abilities. I ensured that the team had a clear sense of direction and collaborated well together, as well as helping them to develop their skills and I actively encouraged them to share their knowledge with one another. I also encouraged them to learn from their failures to help them grow rather than failure necessarily being a bad thing. It was important to me that my team was happy as this makes for a better working environment and a happier team which results in better motivation and performance. Along with this I helped to further improve the deliverability of the work as well as balancing that with good quality code to ensure the team delivered quality work at a satisfactory rate. This was done by looking at processes objectively to ensure that the best approach was used and team members' opinions were taken into consideration.

I was also asked to head up the company’s first expansion into a new country in over 5 years, Germany, which required ensuring the site was fully translated into German.

During the expansion into Germany I moved teams to take over the International team which had seen a decline in developer numbers and brought the expansion work with me. Once this was successfully launched I focused on growing the team and took it from a team of 5, up to 2 sub teams of 6. I applied the same management techniques I honed within Business Critical within the International whilst making the transition from a Maintenance/bug fixes focused team to one which is more project focused.

One of the bigger projects I also managed is the rewrite of the company’s Bonus Service, which is a key service that is used to provide our members with bonuses when they interact with our site in various ways (purchases, sign-ups, referrals). This rewrite is necessary due to the amount of tech debt currently within the system and the limited opportunities for expansion, sizing and feature development, due to the current architecture.

Tech Stack Managed: .NET (C# & VB), AWS, SQL & Document Databases, Rabbit MQ, Jira, Team City.

Senior DeveloperTopcashback

Jan 2017 - Jul 2017 | 5 Months Bolton, UK

I started at Topcashback as Senior Developer working within the Business Critical team, which primarily focused on bug fixes and general website maintenance for the 3 Global Topcashback Site. I helped mentor the junior members of the team and used my previous experience to help improve the throughput of work within the team, because of this I was fast-tracked to Technical Lead of the team.

Tech Stack: .NET (VB), Web Forms, Win Forms, AWS, SQL, Jira, Team City.

Senior DeveloperMobedia

Jan 2015 - Jan 2017 | 2 Years Manchester, UK

While at Mobedia I worked on a variety of projects from, turning an Excel worksheet based system into an online system for external suppliers and internal users using Winforms for a multinational pharmaceutical company, to building a responsive MVC online shop for purchasing products using points earned from a reward system for a tyre manufacturer & supplier, and building an intranet system for handling sales enquiries, orders, commissions and product faults and damages using MVC for an technology rentals company.

During these projects I helped provide quotes for the job, helped plan the workload to fit to the timescale, and ensured that the projects came in on time and within the quoted budget.

I regularly assist other team members in solving problems and was often in communication with clients to explain the technical aspects of the projects, as well as to discuss how they would like the end product to perform. This helped me to ensure that I completed the project to their satisfaction, instead of simply producing an end product that matched the pictures provided by the design team. This required me to be an efficient project manager and to have good communication skills

Tech Stack: .NET (VB), Webforms, MVC Razor, SQL.

Software DeveloperTigersolv

Oct 2010 - Jan 2015 | 4 Years, 3 Months Bolton, UK

At Tigersolv I spent my time working on projects within the three systems the company developed; Debtsolv – the flagship financial management software, Weblynx – the web based customer and introducer portal which connected to the Debtsolv system, and Creditor Portal – the online web application which connected financial management companies to creditors.

I was in charge of distribution of the jobs amongst the development team which gave me more experience of managing workloads and prioritising work to keep the department running smoothly. I corresponded with the support department to ensure that the job descriptions were complete and that all of the information required to carry out the job correctly was available to the member of development that the job was allocated too. I also worked closely with the support team to diagnose issues and worked on both short and long term bug fixes, as well as reworking the system if a customer required it to work differently.

Tech Stack: VB6, VB.NET, ASP.NET, MSSQL, MySQL, HTML, CSS, Java Script, JQuery, XML and Web Services.

Software QATigersolv

Aug 2008 - Oct 2010 | 2 Years, 2 Months Bolton, UK

I started with Tigersolv as a software tester and after learning how the systems work and improving my knowledge of different programming languages, was entrusted with the remote installations of the system before being promoted to a role as a software developer.