William Poynter
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I started my engineering career as a keen hobbyist, teaching myself how to write software throughout University, in the era when PHP & MySQL was cool. In the early days of work, I worked for small companies as the most senior engineer (and occasionally the only engineer), meaning I had to develop the full stack. But I always preferred developing the backend and data solutions to the experience solutions. Now, I heavily focus on architecting solutions to the complex system and data problems that global healthcare has to offer. All wrapped up with leveraging the benefits of the cloud to give cheaper and faster high-availability and performance.
Aside from engineering, I am an experienced manager, who enjoys building great teams. I have managed a department (tribe) of over 70 people, with a wide range of skills needed to build a modern engineering product. Front-end, back-end, QA, design, delivery, product management, etc. Although I like employing models such as Agile development, or Spotify’s tribes and squads, I am a big believer that you build teams of people; models need adjusting and flexibility to meet the talent you have.
Outside of work, I try to keep active with a few runs and gym visits per week to offset the laptop lifestyle. I have run 10 half marathons and currently training towards my first marathon. A while ago, I also cycled from Lands End to John O Groats and I am hoping to do more multiday cycles in the future. I also have a tendency to say “yes” to whatever fun things friends suggest, which is why I just got my scuba diving license, which I have yet to try out in warmer waters.
Skills
- GraphQL/Gateways
- Serverless
- Microservices
- RESTful APIs
- SaaS/PaaS/IaaS
- CQRS
- Autoscaling
- Java
- Ruby
- bash
- C++
- C#
- javascript
- Go
- SQL
- TypeScript
- git
- Terraform
- Hashicorp Vault
- Circle.CI
- Jenkins
- GitHub
- New Relic
- Jetbrains
- Jira
- React
- Rails
- Express
- Next.JS
- Istio
- Kong
- NGINX
- Wordpress
- Hugo
- Firebase
- MySQL
- Postgresql
- Redis
- Elasticseach
- S3
- Kafka
- Kubernetes
- Docker
- AWS
- Google Cloud
- Heroku
Publications
A collection of articles, presentations or blog posts I have created over the years.
Blog - Using Word Cloud Plus to see the different ways today’s news is reported
Blog - Monolith to Microservices: Frequently asked questions
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See all Publications for more examples!
Experience
Consultant
As a technical consultant I am a generalist, with a good working knowledge of the overall technical and engineering landscape; this gives me the ability to get up to speed very quickly with new organisations or topics. My previous experience makes me particularly useful in a range of areas, including:
- Solution prototyping
- Architectural designs
- Auditing existing tech and plans for improvement
- Strategy for replacing old systems with new
Chief Technology Officer
Tinto is an exciting UK startup helping to connect mums and mums-to-be. We are developing a platform that enables mums to ask each other for advice, ask and expect for advice and search through the Tinto library of sage motherhood advice.
As the CTO of a startup, the responsibilities are far ranging from IT services, product delivery, architecture, information governance, security, compliance and staff development.
Director of Engineering
Providing leadership, guidance and architectural oversight for the Platform: Foundation tribe (formally Membership & Enterprise). Responsible for cross-cutting domains such as:
- IAM
- Multi-Tenancy
- Membership Management
- Consent Management
- Feature Control
- Profile Management & Search
- Data Subject Tooling.
The tribe was also home to the infamous CBS squad, which provided deep knowledge and caretaker responsibilities for some of Babylon’s longest running systems.
At its peak, Platform: Foundation consisted of more than 70 people with 55 of them being engineers.
Squad Lead
Shortly after becoming the squad lead of the Consumer & Business squad, the product manager and I reinvented the squad as CBS (Core Business Services). This clarified the remit and gave the squad a new identity. Overtime we grew the squad from 5 people to 25. After which we reorganised the area to create several spin-off squads making CBS a more manageable size. CBS, the spin-off squads and one other then formed one of the first platform tribes, Membership & Enterprise, which I then led.
Overtime CBS was responsible for an incredibly wide-ranging area, that would later form the majority of the Babylon Platform.
Senior Engineer
Technical Manager
CLOSER is a consortium of some of the UK’s biggest and longest running longitudinal studies focusing on infrastructure and impact. Part of this work included the development of CLOSER Discovery, a search engine to publish documentation about the longitudinal studies and their datasets.
As the Technical Manager, I was responsible for the engineering decisions, technical consultancy and inter-group technical liaison. My responsibilities included chairing the Technical Oversight Committee four times a year and being lead engineer for the search engine and all metadata tooling.
Metadata Officer
Chief Technology Officer
Database Developer
Testimonials
Dr Hannah Allen
Tom Ford
Will is intelligent, reliable, and has an innovative approach to his work. His down-to-Earth demeanour means he explains complex ideas or processes in an engaging way, making difficult things easy to understand.
On top of his expertise as a programmer and systems developer, he also has fantastic commercial acumen and often provides valuable ideas in additional to great quality work. He is an ideas person with the intelligence and skill to carry them out brilliantly.
As CTO for my company, Research Through Gaming, Will collaborated effectively with our team, and developed software systems - from scratch. He impressed me every day.
Save yourself time, and hire Will Poynter.
Betty Adamou
Kavindu Wijesuriya
As CLOSER’s Technical Manager, and my current line manager, Will has shown great leadership and effectiveness in making the project a success. I have thoroughly enjoyed working with Will and I have learnt a huge amount during this time, as Will has been a mentor as well as a manager. Will has allowed me space and time to develop and improve within my role, as well as opportunities for further advancement.
In a very short time Will has moved up several grades within the project, taking the further responsibility and management in his stride. He is very dedicated to work and his career, and takes pleasure in working through problems, programming and innovating. Will is an expert in metadata documentation and enhancement, and has knowledge of many programming languages as well as bespoke software, infrastructures and databases. In addition, he has great communication and networking skills. He has excellent rapport with colleagues and external partners, and always gives entertaining and informative presentations. Will is always pushing the boundaries of what is achievable and leading the way for others. He has great vision and ideas, and finds ways to put them into practice. His knowledge and proficiency have been a huge advantage to the project and he will be very difficult to replace. Will will make a positive and beneficial contribution to his next project, and any new managees will be fortunate to have him as their manager.
Hayley Mills
Education
The University of Manchester
The University of Manchester
Bilborough College
- Maths (A)
- Physics (A)
- Electronics (A)
- General Studies (A)
The Gedling School
- Double Science
- Maths
- English Literature
- English Language
- Religious Studies
- Design & Technology