David Rolle

Technical Lead for dozens of software implementation projects, often leading teams of up to 6 other engineers. One day a week spent on internal tooling and automation projects

• Completed every project with a successful customer go-live and excellent customer satisfaction
• Several returning customers cited having me as the project tech lead to be a key factor in them signing the deal
• Successfully trained several other people to take over customer projects from me
• Lead many customer technical workshops, performing requirements analysis and creating technical designs
• Developed countless product customizations as well as new applications from the ground up, using languages such as TypeScript, HTML, CSS, and Java and frameworks such as Angular, Svelte, and Spring MVC
• Resolved critical production issues in live customer environments with minimum downtime
• Created internal DevOps tools, E2E testing tools, and process automations that are used today by many other engineers globally
• Championed the department-wide migration from SVN to Git
• Mentored juniors and seniors alike in a variety of skills such as TypeScript, Automated Testing, Git, and coding best practices

Created greenfield custom software solutions and added new features to existing customer software, all of which are still in use today.

• Converted a Windows-only inhouse build tool to be cross-platform (with Python) and added full test coverage
• Created a new tool for automated set up of development environments (Clojure/Java), saving each engineer hours of work
• Added new reports to an existing web-based project report tool & optimised the backend (HTML/CSS/JS, Java + Velocity)
• Added configuration support to an in-house production performance profiling & analysis tool (Java)

As the technical half of this two-person startup I wore many hats, including taking part in design and strategy, architecting and building our product, and setting up the processes for future product development & engineering success. In hindsight our solution was heavily overengineered for the stage of our startup, but it was an incredible learning experience for me as I acquired deep hands-on knowledge of many cutting edge technologies, while also learning the hard way that often something old and boring is better

• Architected & built a full-stack web application (React + Clojure + Datomic + Kubernetes)
• Set up CI with automated E2E testing using business-defined BDD language (Cucumber) and HTML reporting
• Set up CD to preview environments for every PR to support pre-merge functional QA, and to a staging env for pre-release testing
• Set up one click, zero-downtime deployments to prod with automatic rollback on test failures
• Set up immutable builds that can be run locally using docker images tagged with the commit hash
• Defined processes and implemented tools for issue management, design specifications, work breakdown, effort estimations and milestone planning, QA, and so on

• Tech lead for all EU customer implementation projects, then managed a team of 2 other technical consultants as our customer base grew
• Started a company-wide initiative to start using test automation in implementation projects, increasing quality and reducing the cost of upgrades
• Championed the use of proper issue tracking and helped set up JIRA workflows to improve the reliability of project deliverables

After IBM bought Emptoris, the Global Practice team was created as a small strike force of the top 3 SMEs in our SLM software. Our task was to quickly ramp up the IBM sales & services teams and act as mentors in every project.

• Successfully implementated Supplier Lifecycle Management software (SLM) for over 11 customer projects. Tasks included leading customer workshops, requirements analysis and solution design.
• Solution architect for an additional 7 prospect customers in topics such as integration and security, including presenting the solutions to the customers.
• Assisted Product Management with technical feature designs such as 3rd party integration and configuration migration
• Globally enabled the Services, Sales, and Support teams for SLM software, especially in technical topics such as the SLM Web API
• Lead the SLM global practice team in all technical topics

As Emptoris only bought Xcitec briefly before themselves being bought by IBM, my role did not change during this time

Technical implementation of SLM software for our clients, including integrations, data migrations, workshops, etc.

Graduated top of my year