Adam Cooper

Full-stack technologist and leader with over 15 years of experience developing diverse software solutions and building teams for a range of award-winning startups, global brands, and SMBs. Expertise in building scalable web apps and fluent in modern best practices including Agile, DDD, TDD, Continuous Integration/Deployment, and OOP. High level of comfort interacting at all levels of management, clients, and both technical and non-technical team members. Seeking opportunities where my leadership experience and hands-on technical abilities are both valued and leveraged.

Experience

VP of Engineering, Bitrise - Budapest, Hungary    Apr 2018 - present

Bitrise is a Series A startup building Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery tools for mobile apps. Bitrise was part of Y Combinator’s 2017 cohort and was named Tech 5’s “Hottest Startup in Hungary” for 2019.

Hired by founding team to drive implementation of software development processes, build and structure teams, collaborate on product roadmap, and ensure consistent delivery. Assume responsibility for a 10-developer organization using Scrum methods on projects for web, tooling, and infrastructure.

  • Led hire of ~15 engineers and currently manage an engineering organization of ~30.
  • Built Agile process for teams with weekly cadences, backlog processes, estimation and sizing, workload management for each team. Assigned dedicated Product Owners to each team. Doubled delivery velocity over one year with weekly iterations.
  • Fostered a culture of continuous improvement, learning, and knowledge sharing. Introduced retrospectives, dashboards to visualize team performance and velocity, a learning platform with on-demand content, monthly tech talks, and setting of individual goals in monthly one-on-one meetings.
  • Introduced consistent monitoring and logging processes for each team and centralized tooling using Datadog to identify patterns. Implemented proper alert and incident handling processes leveraging PagerDuty.
  • Led development of multiple new features including a well-documented API, SAML-based single sign-on, two-factor authentication, support for Google Flutter (upon release of Flutter SDK v1), ability to run tests on physical mobile devices as part of build pipeline, and remote access to virtual machines running their builds.
  • Oversaw a front-end rebuild and migration from a legacy monolith to decouple API and SPA for all public-facing pages, dashboards, and sign-in/sign-up pages.
  • Managed effort to rebuild developer documentation including localization for Japanese market.
  • Rolled out a re-architecture of the infrastructure platform that ensured virtual machine builds and to provide availability of both Linux (on Google Cloud Platform) and Mac OS physical machines (in Atlanta) on ‘hot standby’ to support high traffic.

Head of Technology, LivingLens - Liverpool, England   May 2015 - Nov 2017

LivingLens is a funded ($3.5M+) startup building a video intelligence and mining platform that allows users to understand what people say, do, and feel within video through the use of computer vision.

  • Hired as Employee #5 to build out a team of six permanent hires and multiple consultants to fill technical gaps. Researched and selected a technical stack able to ingest, analyse, and serve terabytes of video.
  • Implemented auto-scaling, continuous integration, agile delivery and a culture of testing and technical excellence that has allowed the platform to grow rapidly while remaining stable and performant.
  • Company awards included SXSW Top Tech Businesses (2017 finalist), Tech Northern Starts (2016 winner), TechCity Insider’s Best Technology Business in the UK (2015 winner), and Tech of the Future startup competition (2015 winner).
  • Stack included Node.js, ElasticSearch, IBM Watson, MongoDB, C#, JavaScript, Ember.js, TypeScript, AWS, Azure, WebdriverIO, Docker.

Technical Director/Principal – Sequence 7 Ltd. - Liverpool, England   Apr 2005 - Apr 2015

Established Sequence 7 as a consulting company to serve clients ranging from large multinationals to early stage startups.

Consulted to nearly 15 organizations over ten years as Architect or in Lead/Senior Developer roles. Highlights include:

  • For Unilever, enhanced an application that enabled assessment of financial and strategic viability of products, advised on new technologies, and mentored developers on Azure and OData.
  • For Unilever, provided architecture and development of a product configuration tool, mentored existing team members, and led implementation of best practices including continuous integration and deployment.
  • For Amnesty International, led initial stage web development and integration with document management and CRM. Automated deployment to cloud.
  • For a financial company, architected and developed a loans data warehouse with import from legacy systems and trained development team.
  • For a Fintech startup, led architecture and development the second phase of a consumer-facing web app and a card management system with integrations for multiple Visa issuing web services, BACS processing, anti-fraud services, and CRM.
  • For IT Developers, architected and developed a web-based app and supporting services to enable daily import of data from legacy apps and monitor KPIs for legal practices. Architected and developed a consumer-facing web app and services to enable purchase and management of a Visa prepaid card and integrated with third party services for payment processing and KYC web services. Developed a web-based insurance quote system with payment processing, reporting, and user account management.
  • For Thoroughbred Solutions, developed a web-based loans app to process £16 million in loans daily. Integrated with third party web services to provide identity and credit scoring functionality, and integrated with legacy loan processing and content management using COM+ and XML.
  • Stack included C#, JavaScript, TypeScript, SQL Server, AWS, Azure, NUnit, xUnit, MSTest, Jasmine, OData, Git, Mercurial, TeamCity, TFS, Octopus Deploy, Gulp, jQuery, AJAX, Knockout, Entity Framework, NHibernate, SubSonic, Subversion, ASP.NET/ASP.NET MVC 4, WCF, SSIS, SSRS, Sharepoint, Umbraco

Additional projects (omitted for space) included a hotel booking system, a student and course management app, a web-based auditing tool, a custom content management system, a consumer-facing informational web app, a university application app, and a native quality UX for a mobile-first web app, all featuring the Microsoft stack.

Development Team Leader, Cooperative IT - Bromsgrove, England   2001 - 2005

Cooperative IT (originally PandaNet) is a software development and hosting firm.

Led a flexible development team of up to 14. Major application developments included:

  • Migrated cooptravel.co.uk (one of the UK's largest holiday sales platforms) from classic ASP and server side JavaScript to ASP.NET.
  • Led development of a web-based data warehouse and reporting package for one of the UK's largest retailers.
  • Led build of a leisure centre system, including ePOS, online booking, and back office functionality.
  • Initially hired as a developer by PandaNet building a revolutionary large-scale online travel booking site in the UK (cooptravel.co.uk), a commercial web-based content management system, an HR desktop app, and an online business directory. Promoted to Team Leader in 2003.

Researcher, The University Of Birmingham - Birmingham, England    2000 - 2001

Developed an SDK (C++, DirectX, HTML) and supporting documentation for the Department of Brain and Behavioural Sciences.

Education

BSc (Hons) Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, The University of Birmingham