Career software engineer with deep expertise in Python and cloud-native backends. Has shipped production systems across fintech, health tech, media, and enterprise — from greenfield startups to legacy-critical infrastructure. Equally at home building APIs from scratch, untangling inherited codebases, or levelling up a team. Actively interested in integrating AI/LLMs into real products, and open to picking up whatever the team needs — Go, Rust, C++, you name it.
Maintained critical legacy Python 2 infrastructure handling salary packaging data exchange with enterprise payroll clients. Navigated a continuous stream of security vulnerabilities, deprecated libraries, and decades of accumulated technical debt — keeping production stable under a strict ROI-driven, 12-week planning horizon. Worked alongside a large team of experienced engineers in a demanding "keep the lights on" environment where every decision required hard justification.
Python 2, PostgreSQL, Linux, Git, Ansible
Fitness-device APIs and AWS data pipeline for a startup acquired by Zurich Insurance to become their Livewell health app.
Python, GraphQL, AWS (DynamoDB, Aurora, Kinesis, Lambda, Glue, Athena), Terraform, Node.js, Linux
Built and maintained internal tooling for Google's Technical Support Engineering teams. Key projects: the global ticket auto-assigner routing cases 24/7 across the globe, a browser extension injecting live data from multiple internal Google systems into TSE screens, and an expanded routing system enabling enterprise-grade support via a specialist third-party team in Mexico.
Python, JavaScript, ClosureJS, Protobuf, Linux
Introduced and championed Jupyter notebooks to a team of market data analysts, enabling them to run their own research independently and significantly reducing the bottleneck on engineering resources. Also built a CLI tool for decoding raw financial market data streams from AWS S3 and contributed features to the mqdashboard web application used by global analysts.
Python, JavaScript, AWS
Diverse range of projects across multiple domains: self-evolving genetic algorithm code for academic research; financial market backtesting for a private investor; web scraping for a news aggregation service; a marketing workflow application; and a car-buying web app.
Solo-built the global voice routing API in 9 months; Dolby licensed it to British Telecom as their enterprise conferencing platform.
Python, REST, PHP, JavaScript, MySQL, Linux
Webby Award-winning social platform for Christian youth — membership, chat, photo sharing, event ticketing, and child-protection controls.
Python, Django, JavaScript, PostgreSQL, Linux
Broad experience across a wide range of environments and stacks:
"John was a thoroughly enjoyable fellow to work with and an invaluable source of skill and knowledge. He vigorously works his way to the core of each task, ensuring a well thought out and efficient solution. His many years of experience are obvious in what is the most beautiful and readable code I have ever seen. I hope to work with him again in the future." — Daniel Bradley, Staff Programmer, Copyright Agency Limited
"It was an absolute pleasure to work with John and he would be an asset to any software team. He was involved in some key architectural and technology choice investigations which we are still benefiting from today." — Alister Cordiner, Head of Product Development, Capital Markets CRC
"John would be an asset to any organisation." — Russell Ayling, Technical Manager, Roads and Traffic Authority NSW