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Colin Riddell

Senior Software Engineer
FanDuel
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Colin Riddell BSc (Hons)

Software Engineer and Technologist

Highly experienced, disciplined and formally trained (BSc) Software Engineer, Coach, Educator and Speaker with 17+ years experience across a very diverse range of sectors and technological disciplines, demands and scalability concerns.

Bringing an infectious enthusiasm for Software Engineering best practices, technologies and tech Product Management to teams. Passionate about best practices and introducing the power of new technologies to colleagues.

Can design systems that are robust and fit for purpose while making the correct technology choices along the way. Can adapt to learning required languages / frameworks and a default «bring the whole team» attitude.

Technologies 💡

Currently proficient with: Kubernetes, Helm (k8s), Java, Terraform, Spring, Spring Boot, Spring Security, JPA, Next.js, OAuth DataDog, Hibernate, AWS(EKS, RDS Aurora, SQS, SNS, Lambda), MySQL, React, Redux(toolkit), JS, Node.js, Linux, Microservices, ReST, BASH/zsh, BDD / Cucumber, TDD, Google Cloud, Git, Markdown, GitHub, CI/CD(Travis and Jenkins) and many more

Currently skilling up: RAG, Go, Rust, Kafka, Spark, Graal,

Have worked with in the past: Python, Flask, C, C++, OpenCL, LLVM, Protobuf, Grafana, TensorFlow

Enthusiastic to learn: Elixir, Bazel, GraalVM, Istio, Mojo, LLM-development, Neural Networks.

Experience 👨🏻‍💻

FanDuel

Senior Software Engineer: April 2021 ➜ Present

FanDuel is online fantasy sports and gaming company. I Lead the development of FanDuel's OAuth Authorization Platform which hosts thousands of users across an array of 1st and 3rd party clients.

  • Building session management for 30M users at very demanding throughputs and spikey traffic
  • Enhancing scalability with deep-dive engineering analysis and scalability improvements on memory, compute-density, queue pressure, DB optimisation for DB's with 50M+ rows
  • Using Spring Boot and many other related libraries running on top of k8s and AWS to build scalable back-end systems.
  • Coaching and training on Spring + Spring boot.
  • Taking part in on-call support as part of "build it, own it" team. Mentoring junior and mid-level engineers.

Technologies: Java, Spring, Spring Security, JavaScript/TypeScript, SNS/SQS, React, SQL, Next.js, Kubernetes, Terraform, DataDog

CodeClan

Senior Software Development Instructor: May 2018 ➜ April 2021

CodeClan was a Software Engineer "boot camp" that trained individuals in Software Engineering.

My role at CodeClan was that of both a technical leader and people manager. At CodeClan I used my experience to train colleagues as well as our customers. I lead the creation of new Software Engineering training courses for bespoke clients such as J.P. Morgan + Chase.

Java, Spring, JavaScript, Node, React, SQL, Ruby, Python

Bird.i ( now Zonda )

Head of Product + Lead Developer: Aug 2017 ➜ April 2018

Key in helping determine Bird.i's product marketing fit which was an AI based analysis tool for Satellite Imagery. Selecting an appropriate market for the technology and pursuing that. Also working as lead developer building out technology and training junior team members. Used Java, React and dabbled in TensorFlow.

ResDiary

Product Manager: July 2016 ➜ Aug 2017

Technical Product Manager for ResDiary. ResDiary is a SaaS restaurant booking and table management platform allowing restaurants to manage their tables, bookings and yield. I improved the on-boarding experience of the product, among others.

Senient Systems

Software Engineer: May 2015 ➜ June 2016

Design, spec and implementation of control API for integrated server cluster system based on PCIe fabric.

Python( Flask, SQLAlchemy), Websockets, Java, ReST, Spring, Apache Kafka, ProtoBuf, PXE-boot, Debian

Codeplay Software

Compiler Software Engineer: May 2008 ­➜ May 2015

Codeplay are a specialist software company who build compiler technologies for all types of systems and platforms. My role there was Compiler Software Engineer and eventually team manager for a team building GPU based systems such as OpenCL.

Worked with C++, Python, JavaScript. LLVM, OpenCL, Linux, Jenkins, Docker, VisualStudio.

Interests ⚡️

Outside of software and technology I like cooking and make an excellent curry. I occasionally run 5ks, and sometimes play games on PC + tabletop. I travel when I can, and love a good cocktail. I'm really enthusiastic about whisky with a particular interest in Single Malt Whisky.

I like to experiment with my HomeLab and have an all ARM setup using TuringPi 2. On this I run all media workloads and AI jobs with k8s and helm. I get a lot of joy out of messing around with Linux builds to be able to optimise my setup for efficient hardware decoding.