About Me

I'm a graduated nerouscientist turned software engineer with 5 years experience. I've been travelling Asia for the last 5 months but am now looking for new backend opportunities. Even though Ruby is my baby, I've dipped my toes into the crypto world - experimenting with smart contracts and Solidity and am currently working with Google Cloud Platform and tooling in Golang.

Contact Details

Richard Bates
London
rich.bates@protonmail.com

Experience

Pave (previously Portify)

Senior software engineer March 2020 - March 2022

Small startup utilising open banking data to build a user’s credit score with all three major credit agencies. I worked across the entire stack, from the mobile app built in React Native to the React portal and RoR backend.

  • Responsible for implementing a missing standard infrastructure such as CI, test suite, automated deployment pipeline and resolving various performance issues caused by initial scaling.

  • Led the backend development of the new Flex Finance product in which a monthly report is calculated from user financial activity and sent to all three major credit agencies.

  • Replaced the old system that would take 1 hour+ and crash the server with a new system generating a report in 2 minutes and persisting all data. Utilised postgres triggers, sidekiq async batching, memory optimisation and custom activerecord validators.

  • Developed an open source gem for API integration with Braze CRM.

  • Mentored junior engineers and involved in onboarding technical team.

Babylon Health

Software engineer January 2017 - August 2019

Fantastic startup that combines the ever growing computing power of machines and doctors to create a comprehensive health service.

  • Led the work in moving all payments infrastructure from the monolith to ruby microservices for PCI compliance.

  • Involved in building a new payment gateway adapter for global rollout to Saudi Arabia, USA, Canada and other regions.

  • One of two engineers responsible for the initial roll out of the Babylon ecosystem to Canada - new custom APIs such as those for patient/pharmacy geolocation, medical identifier processing and insurance redemption for different provinces.

  • Migrated existing identity document data from UK Onfido servers to cloud based AWS infrastructure in Canada.

Education

Makers Academy

Software Development September 2016

A highly selective 12 week full-time course that I completed remotely. There was a strong focus on pair programming and agile methodologies. I built applications using a variety of technologies and across the stack whilst following Test Driven Development and SOLID design principles. My team and I completed a multi-platform mobile app for our final project using NativeScript (TypeScript and Angular 2). None of these technologies were taught on the course, yet within two weeks, MakeItStop! was presented and now awaits the app store!

Imperial College London

B.Sc. Biochemistry with Research Abroad (2:1) November 2015

I was a Rector's Scholarship recipient and specialized in Neuroscience, Cancer and Glycobiology in my final year. Worked as a junior research scientist at Universität Heidelberg for over a year in between my studies, achieving a first class mark for my lab report and contributing to published research on the neurovascular link.

Skills

  • Ruby / RoR
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • PostgreSQL
  • GraphQL
  • ReactJS/ React Native
  • Go
  • Google Cloud Platform