Alex Edwards

Alex Edwards

alex@lexedwards.com - https://lexedwards.com

Professional Summary

Dedicated senior software engineer and individual contributor with a passion for technical expertise, collaboration, and developer experience. Leading engineering decisions and strategies to drive innovations in both greenfield and legacy systems. Committed to continuous improvement and driving team success stories.

Areas of Expertise

  • Developer Experience
  • AWS Cloud
  • DevOps
  • Serverless
  • Project Leadership
  • Performance
  • Security
  • Distributed Design
  • Knowledge Sharing
  • Mentoring
  • UX Engineering

Career Highlights

Proving new architecture paradigms through demos and team inclusion

  • Designed and demonstrated targetted proof-of-concepts to engineering leadership members for product initiatives.
  • Lead a hackathon team, producing solutions to faciliate feature development and product roadmaps.

Reducing regular costs by 20% while increasing resiliency

  • Improved firewall protection of production environments to mitigate threats and vulnerabilities.
  • Strategised and lead a team-wide initiative to re-evaluate production deployments through data-driven load testing and optimisations to infrastructure and observations.

Removing knowledge silos with team training and workshops

  • Produced reasoned principles of best practices to ensure operational excellence while enabling understanding.
  • Trained and mentored various levels of engineers, from junior to senior.
  • Led multiple teams through training sessions on new practices, methods, and tools to alleviate technical debt and improve upon team practices.

Professional Experience

Senior Software Engineer

BBC, UK

2023 - Present

  • Introduced new architecture and infrastructure via Architecture Decision Records, implementing and delivering successfully to millions of users.
  • Successfully led multiple workshops centred around upskilling multiple teams on security modelling and mitigations, as well as developer tools in testing assertions, ensuring upkeep of best practices and technical debt.
  • Led ideation and created the methodology on how to find domain-specific optimizations within infrastructure, presenting well-rounded arguments and data-driven evidence for success.
  • A consistent co-ordination and problem solver in multiple disciplines for teams' initiative across the organisation while maintaining core responsibilities.

Software Engineer

BBC, UK

2022 - 2023

  • Maintained and improved core infrastructure, CI/CD Pipelines, and vulnerabilities, resulting in higher overall viability, less technical debt, and overall cost.
  • Subject and domain expert for a bespoke testing framework across multiple teams and micro-frontends. Owned the complexity within, to better technical debt and an engineer's experience.
  • Participation in multiple cross-team initiatives in design ideation, presentations, security, and DevOps.

Software Engineer

Imaginative Software Ltd, UK

2020 - 2022

  • Agile development with an international client on an Education-based technology solution.
  • Delivering secure API-based workflows for licensing and distributing music.
  • On-site support to critical logistics and client demonstrations.

Web Developer

Ecolodge, Vietnam

2017

  • Led on the development of a website for a local company to create an engaging presence in the market.
  • Coordinated the project plan and scope to meet agreed milestones and targets within time and budgetary constraints.

Lead Developer

Coventry University, UK

2014

  • Created and maintained a database-driven website based for a Media Exhibition using PHP and MySQL.

Education and Certifications

Secruity Engineering on AWS

QA

2024

Advanced Developing on AWS

QA

2024

Advanced AWS Architecting

QA

2023

Threat Modelling

JBI

2023

SSL/TLS and Internet PKI

Feisty Duck

2022

BA (Hons.) Photography

Coventry University, UK

Skills

Programming Languages: Typescript, Go, Bash, Rust, SQL

Frameworks and Tools: AWS CDK, Node.js, Docker, Podman, React, Next.js

Cloud and DevOps: AWS, CodePipeline, Github Actions, Jenkins

Software Practices: Systems Architecture, Microservices, Containerization, Test Driven Development, CI/CD Pipelines, RESTful API

Interest

Innovating with new languages (currently Go and Rust) and methods, breaking personal assumptions, and gaining greater perspective and empathy.

Continuous improvement through training, re-evaluating assumptions, and adapting new approaches.

Developer Experience paired with Automation to better enable use of talent and tasks.

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