Dave Osbourne

Skills / Experience

• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Configure CLI
  • Storage / S3 Mounting a bucket as a file system
  • AAA Identity, Cognito
  • AAA CloudWatch
• Linux (and LAMP)
  • Linux
  • Apache SSL
  • MySQL RDBMS
  • PHP
• MS Windows
  • Exchange & Outlook
  • PowerShell

• AJAX / Web 2.0
  • Javascript / jQuery
  • XML
  • JSON
• Android Applications
• Foreign Exchange
  • SWIFT
  • FIX Protocol
• HTML, XHTML and CSS
• ICT Management
• IT Security, IPS, Pen.Testing
• Networking
• eCommerce / payment gateways
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Systems Monitoring & Management
• TCP/IP
• Telephony - (VoIP, Asterisk, SIP)
• Testing (Software)
• Virtualisation & iSCSI
• Web Services
• Agile

Abridged CV, for more, contact me.

Introduction

Active in FinTech and Telephony in Systems Management, Development (incl Devops) since 2007 more recently in Head of IT and Head of Development roles.

Prefer smaller 0-50 person organisations, but have spent 3 years working on Regus' global telephony with thousands of staff/users world wide and 150 IT staff spread between UK and Philippines and more recently Head of Develpoment at Delta Capita where I was responsible for 15 developers and a key report to the CTO.

Proficiencies

Budgetary Oversight | Technical Leadership | Change Management
Software Analysis & Design | Application Development | SAAS
Banking | Payments | Electronic Money | Encryption | Security | FCA | ICO | Companies Act

Experience

Last Updated: 2024-04-18

Systems Management (Linux, Windows), Development (PHP, Java, Android), Project Management and Operations Management then Head of ICT and Chief Architect for a PE owned group of companies including some responsibility for integration of Mergers and Acquisitions.

Financial Services - Reinventing the Financial Services Value Chain

• Head of Development : March 2021 - June 2022
• 15-20 developers (100+ staff)
• Remit: Reform a lack of delivery, reporting to the CIO.  Application development for Tier 1 Banks supporting Structured Products and Due Diligence
• Outcomes:
  • Immediately stopped work on failing projects to re-focus resource on POCs and Demos for sales to make progess.
  • Found that remote working (all developers on-boarded during Covid) and poor senior people management had created a directionless environment.  Worked with the CIO to create and implement a 100 day plan.
  • Developers were empowered – according to their abilities – removing frustration. 
  • Built the team from 5 to 15 developers, instigated formal training, standard desktop and standardised development toolset
  • Single points of failure / key person problems remedied with peer coding and control regained by being present at daily stand-up meetings.
  • Development is now documented in Jira with 2 week sprints.
  • After a year of suboptimum delivery in 2020 2021 has seen software released with 2 more releases planned in Q1 2022.
  • There is good, honest communication with in the development team in a safe space.  Junior developers are free to challenge  – this has saved mistakes.

Financial Services - "bank the underbanked"

• Interim CTO : March 2020 / Aug 2020 – early 2021
• < 10 staff (start-up)
• Remit
• Outcomes
  • Presented OWASP Top 10 Web Application Vulnerabilities training and performed due dilligence on internal and external applications using it.
  • Secure PSD2 compliant Multi Factor Authentication extranet
  • AES encrypted (In Motion) SMB file share with hourly incremental backups allowing custody of data with BYOD working remotely.
  • LDAP integrated Telephony set up in 2 weeks during the first lock down including 2 remote offices.
  • Dynamic firewalling - null routing OSI layer 3 access from Cybercrime IP Feeds by FireHOL and log analysis, but allowing layer 3 access after MFA to facilitate remote working during Lockdown 1
  • In house Jitis Video Conferencing for secure collaborative remote working ensuring data custody.
  • Technical, Security and Regulatory input into EMI application (these documents have passed peer review and been submitted to the FCA) 

Financial Services - "investment management and financial solutions to a institutions, professional traders, wealth managers, family offices and high net worth individuals"

• No Title : September 2020
• Remit: Payments to Bank and Compliance
• Outcomes: Payment upload file in the correct format with PSD2 protections, client self-serv and TruNarraive class including webhook

Marketing - "CRM System for referral marketing"

• No Title : November 2019 – March 2020
• Web (LAMP) and SMTP based referral marketing platform
• Secure, PSD2 compliant, Multi-factor authentication registration and login with one-way password encryption and 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256) encryption to store TOTP secrets. 
• Web based application access for Users
• SMTP based submission of leads for referrers that are securely parsed into a MariaDB database and correctly attributed to Users and Referrers
• WhatsApp notifications to Users using ADB and a custom Android app.
  

Financial Services - "specialist foreign exchange"

• Head of IT : May 2016 - September 2019
• 11-50 staff (outsourced IT support),
• ICT went from 1 to 3.5 internal developers and then beyond 15
• Remit: Various internal and external development and infratructural projects.
  • Operations Manager, then Head of ICT (day-to-day and strategic responsibility for systems, newtork and programmers)
  • M&A integration
  • (Electronic Trading) Banking relationships
• Outcomes:
  • Intranet (bootstrap, MSSQL, MySQL, jQuery, JQPlot) reporting and a basic CRM / Call list application.  Most significantly an internal Affiliate module with call lists, reminders and mapping coupled to an external portal securely showing data including accounting data from Sage.  Permissions were role-based, integrated with corporate AD.
  • webportal that would securely expose limited data from an onsite MSSQL source A and AAAA records. In the first month 14% of users where from IPv6 addresses.
  • Webview in .NET backoffice allowing
    • Client specific data from the Intrenet to be displayed and updated. This was instrumental in M&A allowing a view of historic transactions for migrated client records without involvement of the Back office provider.
    • Algorithmic trade prediction (based on past trades)
  • Intrusion Detection and Prevention System (IDS & IPS) using solid state hardware running Debian and Snort, plugged into the outsouced IT management Co. SNMP monitoring system to send alert. Access via a "dirty" route to the DB servers via segmented VLAN on the switches and ESX.
  • FIX based Trading application (Java / QuickfixJ) interacting with existing Backoffice application running above MSSQL and using a MySQL store for persistence.
  • Monitored OpenVPN WAN and routing set up between DC, M&A and international offices and AmershamHQ.
  • 2 Factor Auth external login (SMS, one way hash, salt)
  • Wifi with Roaming and VLAN segmented GUEST SSD (OpenWRT)
  • Was intrumental in Techincal Due Dilligence during sale to PE in 2018.
• Keywords: FIX / IDS IPS / Snort / PHP / intranet / bootstrap / jQuery / google maps / T-SQL / SQL / MSSQL / MySQL / Firewall / Roaming Wireless / VLAN / IEEE 802.1Q / Private Equity
  

ISP - VoIP Call Rating System

• No Title : April - June 2015
• 0-10 staff
• Remit: Provide client billing and reconcile with payments to upstream provider including call quailty scoring
• Outcome: Asterisk Call Data Records (or Call Detail Records) are used to allow realtime rating and scoring.  Routes for dialed numbers are cached to facilitate quick response.  Cache is manually invalidated when new route costings are received from the upstream Telco.
• Keywords: ISP / Call Rating / MOS / VoIP / Billing

University / Teriary Education - "Where leaders learn"

• March - May 2014
• 1-500 staff,  more than 7000 students
• Remit:Re-write an evaluation system originally written in the mid 1990's to run in a standard FreeBSD LAMP environment.
• Outcome:The re-write was completed with extensive, staged UAT to ensure quality control of imported data and business logic.
• Keywords: Shibboleth (centralised authentication) / LAMP  / System re-write
  

Services Offices - "serviced offices / business centres"

• Developer / Technical Lead / 3rd Line Support : October 2013 - April 2016
• 5001-10000 (project dev team size 0-10)
• Remit: Originally hired as a PHP developer, now multifaceted role including Liason, Test and R&D involvement
• Outcomes:
  • New version, fully Zend2
  • REST API services using JSON
  • R&D on softphone with ability to dial in Video Conference systems
  • Knowledge of the ecosystem (SIP Trunks providers, Revenue Assurance, Integration with other company systems).
  • SIP ALG, SIP Proxy, SIP via NAT on Linux and other platforms
  • Some automated test support experience with ReadyAPI and Groovy
• Keywords: Zend 2 (ZF2) / Doctrine / Asterisk / VoIP / JIRA / BitBucket / Mercurial / Agile / KanBan / Jenkins /API (REST, ReadyAPI, Groovy) / DHADI / SIP / IAX2 / DevOps / Colt / Level3 / Google Drive / MPLS / 8021.Q / VLAN / TOS / DHCP / H.323 / H.264 / G.729 / Revenue Assurance / JSON / XML 
  

Pre 2013

Included only for posterity

Financial Services - "unparalleled currency service for top-tier clients"

• June-September 2013
• 0-10 staff
• Remit:Project Manage Currency Trading Application
• Outcome:The system is live, issues do occur from time to time and due to my expert knowledge are solved very quickly.
• Keywords: FIX / Project Management / Supplier Relations / Currency Trading 

Retail Fashion - "parent company of several retail fashion brands....operate over 1250 stores in 38 countries"

• July/August 2013 
• 100+ staff
• Remit: Create & modify pages on the group's eCommerce CMS to facilitate the UK and international launches of the Autumn Winter 2013 season.
• Outcome: The work was completed within the requirements set out, liasing between the business sponsors, designer the IT Dept and an external mobile website company.  Some pages were delivered within the CMS, others hosted externally and delivered via iframe.
• Public URLs:
  • Lookbook : Outerpage, Innerpage - EU sites have this in multilanguage and the US site has it in an iframe
• Keywords: mobile / jQuery / PHP / BT Fresca Commerce CMS

ISP - DNS Amplification / Reflection

• July 2013
• see my notes on how this phenomenan poses a risk to smaller operations beyond mainstream DDOS attacks.

Creative Agency - in Events Management space

• June 2013
• 11-50 staff
• Remit: create and deliver an "inspirational experience" to 6 iPads mounted at a conference in Spain.
• Outcome:Some basic design and icons where created.  Multiple video formats were converted / sized for rendering on the iPad
• Keywords: iPad / jQuery / WebApp (website)/ video transcoding
  

Creative Agency - "unified healthcare communications agency"

• May 2013
• 51-100 
• Remit: Android Embedded website fault - 1 day to solve.
• Outcome: Diagnosed that the test tablet had the CyanogenMod ROM installed, the 200 odd tablets bought were stock.  jQuery mobile scrolling was too slow rendering on the stock.  After explaining the findings client was unable/unwilling to install the newer OS.  To solve we removed the jQuery scroll and reverted to "css overflow auto", deemed perfectly acceptable.  Deadline was met.
• Keywords: Android / jQuery / jQuery Mobile  / WebApp (embedded)
  

Property - "privately owned, independent firm of property consultants"

• 0-10 staff
• Remit: Backoffice IT
• Outcome: (thus far)
  • Fully integrated email marketing solution - email lists, unsubscribes and logs integrate in real time with the live client database (CRM).  
  • PHP LAMP BO - still in progress
• Keywords: Linux / Apache / MySQL / PHP / email

Creative Agency - "dynamic digital studio"

• 0-10 staff
• Remit: Integrate Joomla with Twitter and Facebook
• Outcome:
  • Joomla/Facebook - JFB Connect + FQL System Plugin to log 'friends' page views and provide this data to the frame work.  Post articles to Facebook
  • Joomla/Twitter - Twitter Auth module installed + System Plug in to st, FQL REST  OAuth FB Connect Joomla module Joore oAuth details to allow Tweets from within Joomla
• Keywords: PHP / Javascript / SVN / MySQL / FQL / REST / oAuth / Joomla / CMS / Facebook / Twitter

Financial Services - "expert currency brokers"

• 11-50 staff (no dedicated ICT staff)
• Remit: Provide advice on IT Strategy  
• Outcome:
  • Arranged free analysis software to gain details of the performance of their VMware resources (saving £2k quoted by supplier)
  • Identified 6 projects with associated businiess case and presented to board
  • Prevented knee-jerk "rip-and-replace" of existing IT infrastructure (saving £20k+ of potentiall unnecessary expenditure)
  • Managed project to completion bringing together 4 parties via regular conference calls
• Keywords: Project Management / VMware / Dell / Businiess Change

Financial Services - "unparalleled currency service for top-tier clients"

• 0-10 staff
• Remit: Provide a solution to deliver Windows-based Backoffice application in a Mac-based office 
• Outcome:
  • VPS setup with 2008r2 and SQL Express.  Reasource delivered to Macs via RDP
  • VPS is based in Tier 4 DC allowing access to all staff regardless of location - very important where there is limited redundancy
• Keywords: Project Management / KVM / Microsoft Windows / VDI / RDP

Financial Services - "Specialists in foreign currency exchange"

• 51-100 staff
• Remit: Various integrations with Counter Parties  
• Outcome:
  • SWIFT FileACT via SCORE setup, tested and handed over.  Liased with Bureau.
  • French CFONB files interchanged with counterparty - PHP parsing algorithm developed and tested.
• Keywords: Project Management / PHP / SWIFT / FileACT / SCORE / Businiess Change

Software Development - "leading and innovative Information and Communication Technology solutions"

• 10-51 staff
• Remit: Solve a performance issue in a VB6 high volume trading applicaiton with MySQL backend
• Outcome:
  • Diagnosed a SELECT read lock and gave developers a way to monitor this and correlate with client performance complaints
  • Provided advice about running large reporting queries on replicted dataset.  This has now been implemented
• Keywords: MySQL / VB6

Financial Services - "Specialists in foreign currency exchange"

• 51-100 staff
• Remit: Constuct new website and implement custom CMS with PHP/ZEND
• Outcome:
  • Layered PSD imaged sliced and assets created including use of css sprites where appropriate
  • HTML, CSS and JS (jQuery) delivered
  • PHP/Zend CMS delivered using TinyMCE for HTML editing
• Keywords:   PHP Zend / HTML CSS JS / jQuery