David Ross's Blog Random thoughts of a coder

David is a hands-on Technical Architect with a focus on the Microsoft stack, his varied career spans cutting code at start-ups in investment data management, renewable energy, hedge fund services and gaming sectors, to running Agile development teams at some of Australia’s and Europe’s largest financial organisations. David has been programming in C# since it was in beta and thus has experienced various technologies such as ASP.NET, Win Forms, Silverlight, WPF, the rise of open source and now the transition to .NET Core. He has a strong background in Cloud First architectures (PaaS, Docker) and CI/CD practices (Azure DevOps, TeamCity).

CAREER ACHIEVEMENTS

· Cloudified a software start up by managing the transition from a VM based solution to 100% PaaS based software stack

· Designed model execution environments for quoting energy forward contracts at EON, for cash flow and asset allocation at AMP, for managing Alpha ESS and Tesla battery charge levels at Evergen and quoting car loan interest rate at Toyota.

· Extensive Financial Services experience – Architect on a Funds Migration/Asset Management project; Senior Consultant on an FX Trading system; back end developer on two commission payment systems; team lead on three workflow projects and two loan origination projects.

· Managed the development of several offshore projects. Responsibilities included project tracking, quality assurance and governance.

Matrix (fintech startup) is a financial data management platform (C#, SQL Server, Azure) used by investment teams at Superannuation Funds, Treasury departments and endowments. It combines custodian, accounting and market data into a single view by applying security matching, overlays and indexed revaluations. On David’s arrival the software installation was manual, difficult to repeat and inconsistent between customers. He drove the migration to a Cloud First/Serverless architecture where a fully featured build and release pipeline is cloned into the customer’s Azure DevOps instance. Matrix components are delivered using NPM which allows customers to upgrade at their own pace. David’s main role was liaising with the customer’s enterprise IT teams starting with introducing the technology during pre-sales, network configuration and security groups during the implementation and defining the support agreements and ITIL practices for BAU. He wrote most of the company’s client facing technical documentation and training materials. In conjunction with his Infrastructure Architect they defined Matrix’s security policies and successfully gained ISO 27001 accreditation. David worked as interim CTO/Team lead in a contract capacity until Matrix resourced the role.

Toyota Financial services had been unsuccessful in replacing their loan origination system on two separate costly occasions. Compliance changes due to the GFC around flexible commissions necessitated that TFS create a simpler more transparent mechanism for setting a customer’s interest rate. The team selected Pega for workflow, eSignLive for electronic signatures, Windward for document generation, SharePoint for document storage and Dell Boomi for integration. David led the TFS IT team who were responsible for the development of APIs to connect to backend TFS systems, population of the Data Warehouse, security and infrastructure. The Risk Based pricing engine utilised R models running inside Docker containers hosted in Azure. David wrote several C# based REST services to integrate Pega with Toyota back end systems and Equifax for credit risk.

Evergen is a start-up / joint venture between AMP Capital and CSIRO and is a market leader in retail renewable energy with its installed battery and solar PV system. By forecasting, the next 48 hours of solar generation and customer’s energy consumption Evergen can trickle charge the battery overnight with cheap energy and drain the battery when it’s most expensive. David, one of the five company founders, was responsible for hiring the development team and designing the product. He designed the hardware platform (Beaglebone, embedded Linux with a custom PCB). Embedded C++ and nodeJS code controlled the AlphaESS battery using CAN bus and to Azure’s IoT HUB. A Cloud to Cloud solution enabled Evergen to control Tesla and Samsung batteries. CSIRO Matlab models were ported to C#, Google linear optimiser and neural networks. The mobile app was built using TypeScript and ionic. Evergen was 100% Cloud based organisation with Office365, Xero and Salesforce making up its enterprise stack.

AMP was an early mover into Cloud technology with most of the organisation servers hosted in AWS using Infrastructure as a Service model. The Cloud Centre of Excellence and the Software Process Engineering Group were formed to help teams move to Cloudify their applications using Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as Code, auto scaling and CI/CD. David worked closely with AWS Architects to roll out developer training programs. The techniques were trialled on the Bett3r Personal Financial Management application and bank account. The mobile app (iPhone and Android) allows customers to forecast their income, bills and savings goals and the system automatically segments their deposits into buckets. David utilised his trading and banking experience to design and develop the engine that managed the cash. In a departure for AMP, Spring Boot, CloudFormation and MySQL were used as opposed to the standard Websphere and Oracle stack. JBehave was utilised to create a suite of scenarios of customer’s with different billing and income schedules.

AMP has a fully integrated (CRM, Document Generation, Planner and customer Portal) workforce and task allocation environment for its customer support and back office staff with five thousand different case types. As part of the migration to the latest version of IBM BPMS the organisation was outsourcing many of the BO tasks to TCS which impacted the allocation and quality steps. Within the duration of the project, numerous new workflows were added to support consolidation of super funds, simplification of super fund asset allocation change requests and the re-platforming of the insurance business.

The NTBS platform (deposit and term accounts, loans and workflow) was popular in many medium sized financial institutions around Asia Pacific and runs AMP Bank. When the developer closed down the Bank inherited a code base of mostly VB6 (think client) and .NET 1.0. David performed a detailed code review and worked with the team to modernise the application. Custom IOC containers, transaction managers, message queues were replaced with framework and open source equivalents (Castle, System.Transacton, RabbitMQ) and the C# code was migrated to .NET 3.5.

As part of the AMP & AXA AU merger AMP Capital inherited a custom VB 6 portfolio management and trading platform (trading and mandate ranges for securities and asset classes, portfolio rebalancing, compliance and historical reporting). David performed a detailed architectural review and defined the replacement roadmap focusing on maintainability, security and performance. The solution utilised Knockout.JS and ASP.NET MVC for the front end, a REDIS based caching and message layer to distribute the modelling calculations and a strategic REST based Data Access Layer to expose AMP Capital's asset management platform (EaglePACE). The Auto Rebalancing subsystem provided trading suggestions to buy and sell across AMP Capital’s 120 billion Assets Under Management. BDD/Specflow was utilised to signoff the financial models with around 100 rebalancing scenarios simulated.

The following projects were spread between working for consulting companies such as Infosys, RHE & Associates, Digiterre, Datacom and direct contracting roles. Technologies varied across C#, Java, Staffware and embedded hardware and software design.

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