Sam O'Brien
Software Engineering Contractor
Software Engineering Contractor
Senior software engineer & team lead available on contract, focused on people oriented processes, technical innovation & excellence, horizontally scalable solutions in micro-service cloud architecture, best practices, and continuous improvement following the Kaizen principle.
Experience includes working at three SAAS startups that were eventually acquired, the perfect crucible for ambitious and talented developers.
Most recently, I design & develop serverless solutions in AWS CDK for big data ingestion & processing.
Hi, my name is Sam O'Brien, I've worked as a software engineer at three startups that were successfully acquired as a developer, principal developer & team lead, and contractor.
I'm now working as a contractor focused on designing and developing novel software solutions in big data through AWS CDK for Hertz.
I've experienced the rapid growth, increases in team size and changes in processes associated with acquisition events and understand the startup environment well, and have thrived in it.
I've also worked in larger organisations, creating processes for smaller teams to work well together within a larger company context.
I've worked as a developer, principal developer & team lead on mostly JVM based & serverless micro-services in AWS and including all areas of a typical AWS SAAS stack in a startup/small business environment.
I've always taken an interest in all areas of the business, from technologies, prioritisation, iteration and improvement, social & managerial concepts and more.
I push for excellence in design, implementation & communication between team members, using process to minimise low-value disturbances to work.
I can do pretty much anything needed to develop a full-stack SAAS in AWS or similar, especially in CloudFormation.
I understand what it takes to run a lean startup, how the team should work, and upon successful growth and acquisition, how it should gradually change.
Following the success of the Telematics project, I have taken the Principal Engineer role overseeing the overall processes, technical health & expansion of the Hertz Telematics project.
This role involves technical guidance, solutions architecture & process definition for 3 engineering teams.
It also involves stakeholder management & integration with multiple OEMs, Hertz teams and working with solution architects to best make telematics data available to their systems.
In this role I have been contracted to aid in the design and development of a AWS CDK based serverless big data solution for fleet telematics, including team lead responsibilities.
This solution includes rigorous testing and dynamic deployments fully leveraging the emergent technology of CDK.
As team technical lead I work with the team Principal Architect, Principal QA & Product owner to ensure we are on track for delivery. I mentor the developers, dictate various processes, identify gaps in requirements and work with the team to deliver the functionality needed.
In this role I have been contracted to design and develop a kafka stream based metrics evaluation service backed by cassandra.
This solution is a bespoke time-series analytics solution with a expected throughput of some 100,000 messages per second for which I am the primary developer & designer. This bespoke solution is horizontally scalable, fault tolerant and blisteringly fast.
Features include bloom filters on ingested messages, abstracted persistence and retrieval at arbitrary granularity, bespoke sessionisation, hyper log log plus probabilistic and deterministic counting, and Optima post processing granular analytics. Such a bespoke piece of software raises the technical barrier to entry to business rivals and is a strong value proposition for a startup increasing annual revenue and considering eventual acquisition.
In this role I was the principal developer for third party integrations for the national scale school management solution for all of Norway. This included development team management, determining requirements with stakeholders and delivering working functional slices for pilot clients.
In this role I was a software engineer working at a successful startup focused on big-data retention and analytics.