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Tom Fleet
Senior Software Engineer

About

I am a highly motivated, detail-oriented and experienced self-taught software engineer with a background in aerospace engineering and materials science. My expertise is in Go, Python, AWS Serverless, REST APIs and microservices/distributed systems. I take pride in producing reliable, clean, robust and well-documented software and systems. I also enjoy mentoring other engineers and sharing knowledge/experience in areas where I'm able to do so. I have a lot of side projects (sometimes too many) and enjoy learning new things to expand my skillset, I have also open sourced a few projects, and am an active open source contributor and maintainer.

Work Experience

Chetwood Financial Ltd.
Wrexham, UK
Digital-first UK Bank
April 2024 – Present
Senior Cloud Engineer
Started a new position within the Cloud Engineering team as a Senior Cloud Engineer with a focus on DevEx, designing, implementing and managing crucial parts of the AWS estate as well as other shared infrastructure/services in a more DevOps and DevEx focussed role.
Highlights
  • Created and rolled out a suite of 'best practice baked in' templates for serverless applications, terraform modules, and reusable github actions that were widely adopted and liked across the organisation.
  • Designed and led the implementation of a private PyPI repository in AWS CodeArtifact acting as a cache pull-through, decoupling the estate from public infrastructure to improve the security posture and deployment reliability.
  • Designed, developed and rolled out a fully automated and safe solution for teams to self-provision GitHub repositories using the templates mentioned above with compliance, security and quality standards managed by automated org-wide rulesets.
  • Developed a number of reusable pipelines and GitHub actions, standardising common actions across the organisation such as continuous integration in Python repositories, and the Terraform plan, review and apply lifecycle.
Chetwood Financial Ltd.
Wrexham, UK
Digital-first UK Bank
February 2023 – April 2024
Tech Lead
Promoted to technical lead of a cross-functional pod; setting a technical & strategic direction, designing higher level architectures, acting as a the organisation's SME for our area, and leading a team of several developers and QAs.
Highlights
  • Led the initiative to design, build and release an entirely new easy access savings product, using a new core banking platform and working in full-stack, cross-functional pod.
  • Championed and introduced the use of static typing in python code as well as significantly stricter linting, leading to a measurable reduction in production errors across a number of services.
  • Led a serverless workshop for developers new to the stack, upskilling them in AWS CloudFormation, SAM, Lambdas, API Gateway, DynamoDB etc.
  • Participated in the interviewing and recruitment of new engineers up to staff level.
  • Mentored new team members and helped to foster an attitude of engineering excellence and best practice within the team and across the function.
Chetwood Financial Ltd.
Wrexham, UK
Digital-first UK Bank
April 2022 – February 2023
Software Engineer
Python engineer working in a cross-functional pod focused on the development and maintenance of the custom built, in-house lending decision engine.
Highlights
  • Key member of a high performing team responsible for a piece of critical infrastructure
  • Coordinated and led the release of a novel dynamic pricing mechanism with a turn around time of just 9 days
  • Managed regular releases of critical infrastructure including 3rd party integration layers and the in-house lending decision engine
Junkshon
Manchester, UK
Cloud migration SaaS provider
May 2021 – April 2022
Python Developer
Backend Python/Django developer split between backend development/maintenance and the implementation of machine learning feature sets on a proprietary web-based platform designed to facilitate cloud migrations.
Highlights
  • Development and deployment of text classification microservices via Azure Functions and Openfaas. Also created a robust and reusable “cookiecutter” template for such services.
  • Maintaining a large Django REST API, addressing bugs, implementing new API endpoints to expose to a react frontend, refactoring as necessary.
Previous Life
Various
Career in Aerospace Engineering and Materials Science, details omitted for brevity.
June 2015 – May 2021
Engineer/scientist focused on advanced materials science, polymer and metallic composites applied to the aerospace industry both in large multinational corporations and smaller research labs.
Highlights
  • Coordinated and led a number of research projects in advanced metal matrix composite technology, characterisation and manufacturing techniques.
  • Published 2 research papers combining advanced computational techniques and materials science.
  • Mixture of production support and R&D activities in polymer composite materials to support production of the Airbus A350-900 and -1000

Projects

  • Spok: A modern, concurrent task runner/build system written in Go.
  • CLI: A simple but powerful library for crafting CLI applications in Go.
  • parser: Combinatorial text parsing in Go
  • msg: A lightweight console printing toolkit for Go CLIs.

Education

Skills

Languages
Python Go Rust HCL
DevOps
CI/CD GitOps GitHub Actions Docker/Compose Terraform AWS SAM CloudFormation
AWS
Lambda DynamoDB API Gateway Step Functions SQS/SNS CodePipeline SAR Pinpoint Kinesis/Firehose AFT
General
Testing/TDD Packaging/Deployment Documentation Git/GitHub Shell/Command Line REST/GraphQL Agile

Publications

Modelling of the Overcasting Reinforcement Process using the LS-DYNA ® ICFD Solver
12th European LS-Dyna Conference 2019
01 October 2019

Innovative use of CFD models combined with liquid metal crystallisation and genetic algorithms in order to predict liquid-solid aluminium bonding to a composite insert.

A Machine Learning Approach to Model Interdependencies between Dynamic Response and Crack Propagation
MDPI Sensors
30 November 2020

Application of machine learning techniques to thermo-mechanical fatigue damage prediction in aerospace materials.

Interests

Open Source
Contributing Maintenance Collaboration
Science & Technology
Astronomy Physics Materials Science Spaceflight Robotics