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James Pitt

Location: London, UK Mobile +44 (0) 7906 616842

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamespitt

Senior Technology Leader passionate about driving innovation and fostering a people-centric approach, adept at solving complex problems with a talent for focusing on simple solutions that have a strong business impact. Excels at navigating ambiguity and bringing people along on the journey.

KEY SKILLS

  • Builds strong teams with a clear sense of mission, high levels of ownership and motivation
  • Expertise in launching large-scale systems and scaling them globally.
  • Leading, developing and mentoring engineering managers
  • Coaching developers to achieve more quality work at a higher speed
  • Strong hands-on technical skills: Android / iOS, Java / C++ / Typescript
  • In-depth knowledge of running production systems and implementing continuous improvement culture and deep understanding of agile development
  • Communicating complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders
  • Promotes novel solutions, secures support and brings together cross-functional teams to leverage cohesive results
  • Creates clear goals and manages project and programmes effectively

CAREER SUMMARY

Google Ads

SRE Engineering Manager Jan 2021 – Aug 2023

Led the ads platform team to enhance developer productivity within an organisation of 8,700 developers

  • Created and led big cross functional team to reduce the speed of initial setup and deployment of services from over a month to a few hours
  • Improving experience of Ads on Android Systems
  • Led effort to re-architect complex system to improve speed of bootstrapping and reduce the pain of migration
  • Reduced losses in revenue by approx $200m dollars by increasing reliability of deployments and roll backs
  • Helped to calculate the business benefits of best practice and then used this to increase reliability and reduce toil by improving compliance

Leading team working on improving reliability and advertiser happiness for the PMax project (biggest Machine Learning (ML) system by turnover - approx $20bn)

  • Successfully drove focus and improvement across a range of systems by developing technical and business metrics, targeted on achieving clearer business outcomes
  • Co-ordinated multiple streams of work based on sophisticated understanding of issues with AI driven sales
  • Led a productivity initiative which reduced number of serious outages ($1m+) by 60%
  • Worked on helping system to scale from 0 to $20bn, and preparing to scale to $80bn by end of 2024

2Ring Markets (algorithmic trading)

CTO Jun 2018 - Jan 2021

Led a SaaS project which makes algorithmic trading easy for non-institutional clients, democratising the process and making it more accessible to a wider client base. This was on both Android and iOS

  • Took over leadership of project after it experienced long delays
  • Delivered a successful launch by offering clear leadership, training and improved processes
  • Created a plan, built buy-in, then reduced hosting costs by 60%, by moving from AWS-based solutions to open source alternatives
  • Advocated for, and built new ML trading system in Python
  • Hired new dev team quickly, with a mix of on and off-shore staff

Tantalum Corporation (IoT for cars)

Head of Development & Operations Nov 2016 – Jun 2018

Focused on the main SaaS and mobile platform, major clients included TomTom, TNT, Samsung and AT&T.

  • Led cross-functional team re-architecting effort to re-architecting and re-platforming the tech stack using modern technology to allow systems to scale up to handle millions of users using AWS, Mesos and Kafka
  • Managing the creation of team to create and deliver Android and iOS applications
  • Managed the hiring, training and mentoring of fast-growing technology teams
  • Created and nurtured a culture which empowered the team to do the right thing for the company – ensuring swift resolution of issues, open communication and improved efficiency
  • Implemented security and operations processes to serve multiple enterprise clients

Altassets (angel.co for Private Equity)

CTO Jan 2012 – Oct 2016

Designed the technology, created the developer team and built the technology stack, delivering a range of mobile and web applications (SaaS). This helped private equity clients to market themselves successfully, resulting in the process of raising funds being quicker and easier.

  • Led the tech effort to bring in investment in a series of rounds
  • Architected the technology stack and successfully led the build out of the system
  • Developed and implemented a continuous improvement culture, encouraging a free flow of ideas and information. This enabled early resolution of problems and a sharing of solutions, leading to high quality code, improved efficiency, and profitable end products
  • Recruited and mentored a large development/ devops team

Ultro Consulting Ltd

Founder / CEO Jan 2008 – Dec 2012

Singlehandedly set up and built an outsourced development firm, building bespoke websites and apps to time and budget. Trading in the UK and the Philippines, our major clients included Barclays, DWP, Environment Agency, Money Advice Service, DMA and a wide range of start-up businesses.

  • As founder and CEO, I set the vision, strategy and roadmap for the entire business, creating management systems and processes to ensure the smooth running of the company
  • Recruited and trained developers, devops and sysadmins, implementing best practice
  • Built the sales team and implemented successful sales processes, landing contracts with major businesses

Dresdner Kleinwort Associate, FX/Credit Strategy 2003 – 2007

J.P. Morgan Associate, Emerging Markets Team 1998 – 2003

ING Barings Researcher, Emerging Markets Equity Derivatives Group 1997 – 1998

EDUCATION AND QUALIFICATIONS

  • MA Cambridge University, 1997 Mathematics and Computing Science