Jamie Lawrence

I specialise in building SaaS products and development teams from scratch

Available for Fractional CTO engagements for small teams and early startups.

Scaled the team, introduced hiring practices,

Introduced processes like on-call rota and incident management, PR reviews, dependancy management, bug rotations, project updates. And tools for project management, production observability, CDN, video hosting, and team management.

Created a culture of

Built the Podia platform from a basic single-user store to a multi-tenant platform serving hundreds of thousands of users, and millions of customers.

Designed architectures and guided developers through decisions and compromises. Triaged bugs

Grew revenue from zero to millions in ARR

Built pillar features like PayPal integrations, email broadcasting, email campaigns, custom domains

Worked with CEO and Principal Designer as the “product team” to set the roadmap, scope features, and designed UX flows.

As part of the leadership team, steered the company through

Ran team activities during our annual retreats, and organised team dinners at conferences.

The Chief Technology Officer’s role is to assure the successful execution of the company’s business mission through development and deployment of technical solutions. This requires engaging with customers to understand their needs, envisioning the company’s service offerings as a web-based business, leading implementation of web applications, and planning for risk and growth.

WorkCompass is a small company focused on the pain and inefficiencies in that dreaded “annual performance review”. We help business owners express their vision and break it down into goals; we help managers write simple plans for their team and evaluate their performance; and we help employees by providing them with clear goals, reminders and an easy way to note their progress.

I’ve held 4 positions within IBM, working on large telecoms and business management applications (the in-joke is that IBM stands for “I’ve Been Moved”):

Software Engineer (1yr): Java client-server application using Swing and Oracle. Participated in every aspect of the system, from designing the database schema to developing the user interface and reducing a large defect backlog.

L3 Support Engineer (3mths): fixing customer defects and providing support in a time-sensitive manner when our frontline support engineers couldn’t resolve the customer issues.

Test Engineer (1.5yrs): installing builds, testing new features, filing defects and retesting the fixes – mostly on Linux, Solaris and UNIX. Worked remotely with the U.S.-based test team and managers via instant messaging, screen-sharing and conference calls. I subsequently trained-up two local members of the test team. In addition to my general test duties, I was the UI Automation expert for two products, developing our UI Automation framework and providing support to the test team. The framework was based upon Selenium, XPath and SQLite.

UI Engineer (2.5yrs): responsible for porting an existing product from old web technologies (HTML frames and plain Javascript) to a modern Dojo stack. This role has presented significant challenges in understanding the legacy code (particularly after the loss of the original developers), learning the new technologies and delivering the product to an aggressive deadline within a new Agile process. I spent that last two months of the release working on and coordinating the internationalisation defects raised by our external test team.

In the next release, I led the implementation of OSLC (that’s a linked-data RESTful interface) for our product using JAX-RS and Jena for parsing RDF.

As part of the research projects, I ported a Java-based agent platform to an embedded Java board. As the main software engineer in the group (the others being artists), I also aided the creation of demo applications and visualisations in Java.

Broadcom Eireann Research was a telecoms research lab formed as a joint venture between Ericsson and Eircom (the irish telecoms operator).

I worked on several European research projects in the area of agent-based systems. My role was primarily in porting the platform to mobile devices, developing simulations and participating in quarterly meetings and reports. I was heavily involved in the successful proposal for a 5th Framework EU project and was given responsibility for one of the work packages.

I also consulted on a telecoms management project by a major equipment management manufacturer, principally by helping their employees get up-to-speed with Java technologies.

I was the company representative to the FIPA standards organisation for interoperability between agent-based systems (with a focus on mobile).

I developed financial data-feed and calculation software in C++ for large investment banks, particularly the interactions with the time-series database FAME. I also undertook the on-site installation of these systems.