Simon Males

Business Savvy Developer

I'm a developer turned engineering manager. Coming from a support role, to system administration, full stack development, and now into a leadership role I enjoy thoroughly. Working with product management, I guide the engineering team to devise solutions that can be delivered in an iterative manner. You'll find me collaborating with stakeholders on technical requirements and expected user behaviours, onboarding teams to an internally developed SDK and keeping the team's individual and shared needs in scope.

Location: Berlin, Germany

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonmales/

Personal: http://sime.net.au/

Work History

November 2014 - October 2020

Senior Manager, Software Engineering for Delivery Hero, Berlin

• Architecting the infrastructure for the Restaurant Portal product and internal plugin SDK
• Facilitating SCRUM ceremonies for the product team: stand-up, grooming, review and planning
• Extensively using AWS serverless technologies: Lambda, SQS, SNS and DynamoDB
• Managing six direct reports, including their performance and professional development
• Performing screenings and interviewing candidates for departmental positions across the company
• Soliciting SDK and component library feedback from remote sister teams (Dubai, Singapore and Montevideo)

April 2015 - November 2018

Faxologist for Bitcoin Fax

Personal project that allows users to send faxes and pay for them with Bitcoin. My concept is that from time to time digital natives need to send a fax and Bitcoin doesn't suffer from merchant processing fees on small transactions.

• Over 700 faxes and 1 Bitcoin worth of transactions in the first year

December 2013 - April 2014

Senior Web Developer for Tinkerbox Studios, Singapore

• TDD with RSpec
• AJAX compatible site scraper
• Migrate MongoDB Arrays into Collections, and deploy MongoDB indexes
• Implement clean URLs for SEO
• Reduced assets file size to increase page speed
• Google Analytics Event tracking for conversion analysis

April 2013 - September 2013

Web Developer for stealth mode e-commerce company, Singapore

• Developing front and backend systems using Foundation and CakePHP respectively
• Converting requirements to Gherkin for BDD and CI with Travis CI
• Responsive CSS for three widths: 320px, 768px and 1024px
• Handlebars.js for templating real time calculations during checkout
• Automated deployments with Capistrano

January 2012 - March 2013

Platform Engineer for Pollenizer, Sydney and Singapore

• Developer and CTO for Coachy, Tiwala, Accruto start-ups
• Developing from Product Manager provided scenarios
• Practise lean startup methodologies
• Relocated to Singapore in October 2012
• Using CakePHP (2012) and Ruby on Rails (2013) frameworks
• Linux System Administration for existing Pollenizer resources

October 2010 - December 2011

Web Developer for Buyinvite, Sydney

• CakePHP development of high transacting eCommerce site
• Resolving process inefficiencies by directly coworking with all departments
• Rearchitected infrastructure, halving the number of servers
• Reducing page load times
• MySQL query tuning

June 2010 - October 2010

Web Developer for Loaded Technologies, Sydney

• LAMP development
• Support, maintaining and upgrading both internal and client SugarCRM installations
• Client requirements gathering

November 2006 – June 2010

Web Support Developer for Independent Digital Media, Sydney

• Developing and supporting PHP sites: homehound.com.au, PRIMPED and The Knot Australia (Rails)
• Formatting HTML newsletters for web based and mail desktop clients
• XHTML compliance, client side scripting via jQuery
• Supporting developers, planing deployment and developer processes
• Web server, database and caching administration

September 2005 – June 2006

Technical Support Consultant for Creative Computing, Sydney

• Successfully deploy and maintain Linux based Point-Of-Sale servers and clients
• Establish pre-sale relationships with clients prior to deployment
• Remote configuration of services such as Samba, CUPS and Postfix
• Support internally developed accountancy package

Education

2016 Certified ScrumMaster, Scrum Alliance

2008 MySQL for Database Administrators, Cliftons, MySQL Training

2006 Linux Professional Institute Certified Level 1 (LPIC-1)

2002 – 2005 Bachelor of Information and Communication Technology, Network Management (Major Study), University of Wollongong.

Other/Personal

• Serverless documentation contributions
• Bouldering and Beach Volleyball
• Represented Australia in Beach Volleyball at the Croatian World Games.