Luke Smith

Responsible for technical and commercial aspects of one of a number of home charging products within EV charging area. Supporting development and delivery of these projects and interdependencies. Planning and co-ordination, working directly with stakeholders supporting from conception to delivery, across multiple national and international geographies at all times putting the customer experience at the centre of everything. Working closely with CPMS provider and firmware developers to deliver Modern Luxury for JLR BEV drivers.

Digitising the business for scale so that financial products can be offered through a broader means of sources. Scoped and developed secure quote tool in Go hosted in AWS for ability to give customers quotes for financial products and graphing capability on Wordpress website. Responsible for liasing with third parties regarding Wordpress website build and hosting and automatic integration of products onto external portals used by independent financial advisers. Business analysis of process followed when onboarding customers to provide requirements for new integrations. Automated rate import for non technical users to update the rate card used in the quote tool. Tooling investigation for the company CRM and project management systems

Managed technical delivery of brand new platforms to support charging services across multiple R&D projects from inception to delivery (including V2G projects) Created and managed an engineering department to deliver solution to manage energy requirements for EV drivers. Responsible for recruitment and providing leadership so that front-end/App and backend engineers had well defined goals. Developed and maintained product roadmap for the R&D projects to ensure timely delivery and set up mature processes to feed a prioritised backlog and to facilitate continuous integration and deployment to a cloud platform hosted in AWS. Used deep knowledge of EVs, charging infrastructure and energy networks to deliver a scalable, supportable platform capable of managing energy requirements for both domestic drivers with V1G chargers or V2G chargers as well as workplace vehicle drivers. Sought feedback from stakeholders by running fortnightly showcases. Chose tools for all aspects of the lifecycle that aligned with the organisation being on a startup budget. Implemented infrastructure as code (Terraform) from the outset and integrated platform with intelligent algorithms developed by data scientists to solve group problems as well as multiple third party APIs. Used Flutter to develop mobile App and PWA

Drove quality strategy and led QAs across a number of Agile teams within SAP CX, pushing for continuous improvement to ensure our k8s platform microservices stack had optimal test coverage and integrated with core legacy ecommerce Hybris product and were delivered in a genuine CI/CD manner. Took an active interest in Agile processes and was Scrum Master for 21 months. Worked closely with Product Owners to understand requirements and define them from a Behaviour Driven Development perspective. Identfied risks and dependencies between separate groups so that the customer goal was met despite having the delivery split across several teams. Added test automation to the CI pipeline for all services (UI and backend). Changed the mentality of the team in terms of testing from a manual approach to a fully automated one and making quality part of everyone’s responsibility. Introduced a “cross team” e2e test framework to ensure features developed by geographically dispersed teams work together to deliver what the customer expects. As a QA multiplier, mentored across six geographically dispersed Agile teams

Line management, personal development and recruitment for international QA team based in UK, France and Germany, defining testing strategy and standards and reporting on metrics including unit and functional test coverage, driving test automation and promoting knowledge sharing on test methodologies and technologies. Highlights of achievements included: Promoting quality best practices and reporting into multiple Agile teams. Successfully introducing offshore manual testers into Paris office Agile teams, improving role of quality in Agile by introducing ATDD and TDD into new projects, driving cross functional work between developers and Quality Engineers, converting brittle UI tests to be API driven where possible, co-ordinating release activities

Line management, personal development and recruitment for QA team and leading the development and ownership of an automated test framework written in Java using gradle/TeamCity/Cucumber/geb (Selenium) under Git source control. Revolutionised the testing function away from being Business Analyst/CEO responsibility to being done by a professional team of testers. Led Research & Development into appropriate tool usage (e.g. stubbing) for NetDespatch who operate SaaS integrated shipping, labelling, tracking and pre-advice solutions for postal and parcel carriers. Highlights of achievements included: From zero test automation in the company, automated smoke tests running saving at least 5 hours per release, assuring testability as we succeeded breaking up our legacy monolithic application into microservices which contained appropriate automated testing at all levels within the technology stack, introducing geb to test PHP UI tier, fully automated SOAP calls made by standalone app used for label printing by all customers

Led a team within the BA Common Architecture Centre of Excellence to successfully design and implement new Business services to be deployed on BA’s Progress Sonic ESB platform – part of the SOA transformation of key airline systems, delivered training to the wider IT community on Web Security standards (OWASP)

Infrastructure/devOps role supporting releases of ba.com where I worked on the expansion of the ba.com platform at multiple tiers including introduction and set up of new servers, developed training material for an offshore support team and successfully delivered this for them to support 130+ dev environments. Planned and implemented platform upgrades such as the migration of ba.com and its related applications from WebLogic 8.1 to WebLogic 10.1 and to Oracle RAC, released ba.com and its associated SDAs (separately deployable applications) such as online-checkin, staff travel and email servicing using automated scripts. Integrated builds provided by development teams into regression test and production environments and supported the testing lifecycle, assessed risk and mitigated customer impact of disruption during releases. Highlights of achievements included: designing and creating automated scripts to allow developers to refresh their environments via self-service thus increasing productivity of our team, continuous improvement to the release cycle to include more automation in our build and deployment processes, ensuring standards were met in that all our WebLogic applications had same release process with dual domain cluster switch and DB configurations

Full lifecycle design and development of a crew Rostering System (UNIX/PL-SQL).

Support role within Nokia’s Service Delivery Management function on a Key Supply Chain Application using technical skills in Oracle and UNIX

Developer / Design Lead on Operational Customer Database (1.6 TB Oracle DB) software (British Airways Executive Club). Development using UNIX shell scripts, Java, C and PL/SQL