Rees Collyer Watkins

* ******** *****, ********* **** 074-**-**-****

Surbiton, KT6 4RG acv43j@r.postjobfree.com

Head of Technology

I am an analytical professional with extensive experience and knowledge of software development, technical management, architecture, and project management; working in the UK and across high profile International organisations. I have astute analytical capabilities and understanding of operational requirements to take advantage of new, emerging and existing technology. I have experience with high transaction volumes systems, operating on scalable architectures across Finance, Travel, and Telecoms.

I am an astute communicator, who easily builds rapport and trust from end-users to executive levels. Through my previous managerial experience I have been involved in building high-performance teams. I am customer-service orientated with vast experience in developing cost efficient solutions.

Areas of Expertise

Leadership & Mentoring

Project Management

Strategic Planning & Analysis

Recruitment & Selection

Training & Development

Object-Oriented Analysis

Design Development

Application Testing

Process Optimisation

Team Formation

Performance Management

Technical Troubleshooting

Professional Experience

Fundamental Software, Cape Town Oct 2015 – Present

Senior Developer

Fundamental provides investment management software to Life, Unit Trust, Pension Fund and Wealth Management Companies such as Alan Gray. A full range of instruments are handled including Equity, Fixed Income, Money Market, Swaps, Derivatives, Unit Trusts and Property.

Extensively utilised system for a number of calculations across a range of instruments, and perform processes such as yield & price calculations for unit trusts.

Highly competent scrum team.

Ensure seamless operations through fixing of mispricing for unit trusts.

Technologies

C++, C#, WCF, JavaScript, Angular, WinForms, Entity framework, object orientated

Bytes Technology Group, Cape Town Sep 2010 – Oct 2015

Development Manager/Architect

Bytes is the largest software provider in Africa and specialises in software development and integration for telecommunications and banking. Customers include Vodacom and Capitec Bank.

Selected appropriate technologies and managed the architectural direction. Skilfully introduced and administered the TDD, CI, DevOps process and technical implementation. Continually improved stability, quality, efficiency, performance, and the client experience of the solution and processes.

Actively involved with the end-to-end planning, definition, and development of solutions, including negotiating scope, resources, time lines, and deliverables with clients and team. Identified poor practices together with future opportunities and implemented process improvements as per team’s capabilities.

Designed and developed object orientated & real time systems, with high transaction volumes (53m queries/ hour) on scalable architectures. Rendered continual technical support to the transaction processor that decomposed transactions, calculated dependencies, executed order and farmed out to servers for execution.

Recruited and led teams of diverse developers. Maintained the technical respect of the team through continual support and leveraging individual skills for performance & productivity maximisation.

Introduced training, coaching & mentoring programmes to get new recruits productive within 1 month; which was earlier, 12 months. Initiated a peer-review and quality control system. Opened and managed a development centre in India to deduce development cost and timelines.

Technologies

C++, C#, .Net stack; Java stack, Web Services (SOAP & REST), Mobile (IOS, Android, Cordova), Web, SQL, DevOps, high transaction volumes, multithreaded, scalable architecture

africado.com, Cape Town Jan 2008 – Aug 2010

Co-Founder/Development Lead

Start-up developing a geospatial aware travel website and augmented reality mobile application; Singlehandedly developed the solution with and through a team of 4 developers.

Introduced an innovative product bringing 1st world UX of online travelling in Africa by aggregating and providing real-time inventory (accommodation, experiences, flights, car hire) combining geospatial coordinates enabling advanced cross selling functionality.

Coordinated with the CEO and successfully identified, prototyped and selected open source libraries and technologies, and singlehandedly implemented a large portion of the application.

Technologies

Java stack, Tomcat, jQuery, Ajax, jQuery UI, JavaScript; SQL (Progress), Cordova, real-time.

Dealogic Ltd, London Oct 1994 – Dec 2007

Team Lead

Dealogic provides specialist financial software to the Equity Capital Markets and Fixed Income Markets. It has provided the software for most major privatisations and new share issues globally, including Google, Deutsche Telecom, Air China, HBOS, Casio and Tesco.

Determined the interrelationship between requirements and solutions, adeptly selected technologies, identified & defined interfaces, and administered all operations related to project conception to design.

Contributed to the developers team efforts, harnessed in-depth knowledge and adeptly developed the backend of the DealAxis system. Proficiently cultivated a real time, low latency system and used optimised in memory data structures, multi-threading, batch writes and asynchronous logging, amongst others.

Enabled the achievement of bottom-line results by writing the memory caching for the system using multithreading and STL containers to store data. Comprehensively achieved 68% code coverage on automated testing, allowing for code optimisations and fast release turnaround.

Acted as a consummate professional and delivered impeccable support on the trading floor for clients, including; Deutsche Bank, UBS and CSFB for seamless working operations.

Technologies

C++, C#, STL, Boost, SQL, object orientated, real-time, low latency, multithreaded.

Career Notes

Developer, TRANSTECH PARALLEL SYSTEMS, High Wycombe, UK, Feb 1993 – June 1994

Education & Training

Master of Science, Computer Science, Rhodes University, South Africa

Bachelor of Science (Hons), Computer Science, Rhodes University, South Africa

IT Skills

Systems:

Windows, UNIX.

Languages

C, C++, C#, SQL, Java.

Web:

JavaScript, jQuery, Angular, XML, HTML.

Technology:

SOA, Web services, Web, Mobile, DevOps, TDD, CI, CD, Scrum

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