Experience
[2018 - Present] Intercom
Senior Data Scientist
Senior member of the Analytics & Data Science organisation at Intercom. Responsible for helping R&D and Product Management leadership understand the commercial impact and performance of their products and services. I collaborate closely with leadership across the company to highlight opportunities and challenges in the adoption, engagement and commercial performance of products and turn these insights into plans.
[2014 - 2019] Backfour (Freelance / Consultancy)
Performance Analytics Consultant, providing bespoke analytics projects for elite sports organisations.
Provide bespoke data analytics, storage and visualisation support and software tools to help coaches and performance staff make use of their data. Projects completed using combinations of Sportscode data, GPS (Statsports & Catapult), physiology and monitoring (wellbeing, msk) and video data.
wal@backfour.com for queries.
[2014 - 2018] : Kitman Labs
VP Engineering & Data Science
Kitman Labs build sport science technology and methodology to help elite sports organisations quantify injury risk.
Responsible for technical leadership in the organisation. VP Engineering & Data Science.
Responsible for the architecture, development and operations of a diverse data analytics platform. which includes iOS, Unity 3D, Ruby, Rails, PHP and a heavy use of Amazon AWS and other datastores. The system has doubled in size and data processing capacity every 6 months between 2014 and 2017. Other roles included establishing the product development processes, data science and analytics processes and integration of technical departments across the company and establishing new technical disciplines (e.g Data Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering).
[2013 - 2018] : Hockey Ireland - Senior Mens Team
Lead Performance Analyst
The Irish Men’s Hockey Team compete against the worlds best teams at various world level events. The recent highlight was qualifying for and competing in the 2016 Rio Olympic Games.
Performance Analyst responsible for delivering statistical and video performance analysis to the coaching team and players. Introduced a player driven self analysis system, an ‘in game’ video sharing system (to deliver video clips to coaching staff during games) and online tools for distributing performance and video data to elite squad members who are distributed around Europe.
Since 2014 the Ireland mens team jumped from a world ranking of 15th to 8th.
Olympic Games 2016, European U21 B championship, World League 3 gold medal, World League 2 5th place (record).
[2011 - 2014] : Amazon Web Services - Cloudwatch/Monitoring
Senior Software Development Engineer
The Cloudwatch/Monitoring group at Amazon build and operate a massive scale monitoring infrastructure which runs on tens of thousands of hosts in production, and software agents which run on millions of EC2 instances. The monitoring team are responsible for building the monitoring infrastructure for every AWS product and the various Amazon retail websites.
Developed features across AWS including AWS AutoScaling, Cloudwatch Alarms and Cloudwatch Metric storage. Led the refactoring/optimisation projects of the internal/retail alarm triggering infrastructure.
[2009 - 2011] - Contrast
Senior Software Development Engineer
Contrast was an innovative consultancy and product company whose founders went on to found intercom.io
Senior Engineer on bespoke client projects and responsible for building and running getexceptional.com, one of the first error tracking tools for Ruby apps. Exceptional grew it’s user and traffic count by 400%, from Aug 1999 - Aug 2010.
Presented at the Scottish Ruby Conference in 2010 about error handling in ruby/rails apps.
[2009] Twick-Twock.com
Software Development
Twick-twock.com (since dead!) , was a popular temporary unfollow service for Twitter. At its peak, it had 671k users and handled 100k unfollow requests per month.
[2005 - 2009] - The TAS Group
Senior Software Development Engineer, Implementation Services Lead
Dealmaker is a methodology and technology platform to improve the sales effectiveness of sales organisations. Dealmaker integrates the TAS selling methodologies into customer’s CRM environment.
Senior member of the Dealmaker engineering team and subsequently responsible for customer integration and deployment, including integrations with Microsoft .NET, Salesforce.com and Siebel CRM.
[1999 - 2005] - IONA Technologies
Senior Software Development Engineer
IONA Technologies was a very successful Irish software company who built integration middleware products. The company was subsequently bought by Progress Software in 2008.
[2004 - 2005] - Mobile Orchestrator
IONA Technologies spun off the ‘Mobile Orchestrator’ business unit un 2005. MO was a software platform for building ‘occasionally connected’ mobile applications. The innovative technology was piloted at American Airlines, Dalkia and Snap On Tools.
[2004] - Orbix Connect
Led the development of the worlds first standards based J2EE to CORBA Bridge (Orbix Connect) based on new functionality in the J2EE specification (JCA - Java Connector Architecture). Released
[2003 - 2004] Java Messaging Service
IONA proudly had the world’s first J2EE 1.4 certified J2EE application server. I was responsible for the implementation and integration of the CORBA based messaging service into the J2EE stack.
[2003] - SOAP Web Services
Developed the web services integration features for the new IONA J2EE server. Released and in production early 2003.
[2002] - Servlet/JSP Engine
Worked with a highly talented team on the re-development of a scaleable CORBA based J2EE compliant servlet engine. Released and in production early 2003.
[2000 - 2002] IONA Professional Services Consulting
Java/J2EE/C++/Distributed Transaction Management consulting engagements in Europe and USA at HP, IBM, UBS, Merrill Lynch, AT&T, Telefonica, TIM Mobile, Siemens, Winterthur, Swiss Re.
[1999 - 2000] - IONA Professional Services Training
Developed and delivered material for the IONA Java CORBA and J2EE training courses.
[1995 - 1999] - Trinity College Dublin
1st class Hons Degree in Computer Science
Awarded Ludgate Prize for #1 grade project in year.
‘Backlets’, a distributed, network based http web browser, where the functionality of the web browser was distributed across API based, registered servers on the internet.