James Barnett

Department for Work and Pensions

Backend engineer helping develop the Universal Credit system. Working with microservices as separate modules within a monorepo. Collaborated with other disciplines (content design, business analysts, delivery manager, product manager, and others) and provided technical input to help plan and develop features.

Services were written with a Java 21 backend, with mustache templates used for the presentation layer. RESTful APIs were provided for synchronous inter-service communication, with Kafka for message handling and MongoDB for persistence. Worked with a weekly release cycle. Scale was a constant consideration given the millions of Universal Credit claimants, with regular performance and regression testing. Due to the sensitive and personal nature of the data, care and caution was taken when storing and logging data, and obfuscation used when debugging incidents using preview environments.

Also took on line management responsibilities, helped mentor junior engineers, and interview candidates.

Kobalt Music

Backend engineer on the Chain of Title team - determining what royalties should be paid to various interested parties. Web service was built using Spring Boot, and Spring Cloud Streams with the Kafka Streams Binder for the async interface. Terraform was used to build infrastructure, with resource tagging to help determine costs. AWS Lambda was used, alongside Data Migration Service and Step Functions to handle a daily migration job. An Oracle database was our source of truth, with data migrated to AWS RDS MySQL and Aurora Postgres. Used CircleCI for continuous delivery, with code going from Pull Request, triggering tests, a Docker build and push, then deploy to ECS using AWS Fargate. Request tracing and montioring was provided through DataDog APM.

Initially was on the Sync team - providing an interface to allow users to easily and quickly search for music to provide third parties. Backend was written with Scala using Akka HTTP, using ElasticSearch to store documents for search. Used BitBucket as a repository store, with Bamboo for continuous delivery.

Schibsted

Backend engineer in Ads APIs Team working on greenfield projects. Built ad booking, selling, reporting and forecasting service APIs. Services were written in Scala using Finatra and Slick, with Aurora Postgres for persistence. Involved in technical design and discussions when developing features, communicating with dependent systems both internal and external to the organisation. CloudFormation templates were used to managing infrastructure, with services being built into AMI images and deployed onto EC2. Docker used for integration tests, TeamCity for continuous delivery, where approved pull requests could be merged, and deployed through the environments after automated rounds of tests had passed. Product support was provided through DataDog metrics, which could then trigger PagerDuty alerts.

Yahoo

Backend engineer in Mobile and Emerging Products. Working on transitioning the REST API for the fantasy football app from an older PHP system, to a newer Java-based one using internal frameworks. Alongside this, assisted on a node.js middleware project that allowed clients to be transitioned endpoint at a time from the old backend to the new one, with performance monitoring and checking for response correctness.

During a summer internship, I provided a dashboard visualisation for projects going through the continuous delivery pipeline to be displayed on an office monitor. User story information was collected from a Rally API, and the Jenkins API to show pipeline progress. Frontend used YUI3 and D3.js for graphs and visualisations, with node.js and the express framework for a simple backend.

MEng Computer Science - First Class Honours