Partnering with startups and established organisations alike to architect, build and ship web applications and cloud infrastructure, taking projects from concept to production. Adopted a nomadic lifestyle following the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions while continuing to deliver solutions remotely.

Freelance Software Engineer & Tech Lead

Led development of a SaaS platform that serves as the Trade OS for resellers, consolidating inventory, order and logistics management as well as trade compliance across borders into a single workflow.

Tech Lead

Took a custom <a href="https://www.bi.team/bi-ventures/predictiv/">market research app</a> for conducting nationwide surveys in the UK from prototype to production on time and budget, working closely with the stakeholders and a small dev team.

Senior Software Engineer

Sped up the complete rewrite of the Goosechase platform, an app ecosystem to plan and run scavenger hunts, by taking over the port of the web app’s admin panel and switching the whole team to trunk-based development with 100% test coverage for new features.

Took the monolithic Mara crypto wallet API and web app from prototype to production, leading a team of a dozen very experienced developers, splitting the app into micro-services, focusing on security and performance while working against an extremely ambitious timeline.

Responsible for developing and maintaining the Indeed Flex web application with special focus on the client experience (i.e., companies hiring workers through Indeed Flex) Highlights • lead and and saw through a project around retroactive shift management that has resulted in a permanently reduced workload for the Operations team, a significantly better internal requirements gathering process and an ongoing series of internal workshops to foster knowledge exchange across teams • implemented and ran an A/B test that has led to a thorough understanding of client preferences • devised and implemented a data model, enforcement engine and API for legal and client-specific compliance rules for better matching of only fully qualified workers and shifts

Responsible for developing several services that comprise the HomeHero platform as well as their underlying infrastructure • devised and implemented the property service with the property and its associated contracts being at the centre of most of HomeHero&#x27;s processes (e.g., service provision and billing) • took over, restructured and extended the user service that&#x27;s at the heart of the communication between all the parties using the system as well as authentication and authorisation • worked on the design and implementation of the event-based communication infrastructure that all platform components as well as client applications would use for data exchange, status updates and such

Lead Software Engineer

Responsible for developing and maintaining the Board Portal web application and supporting services
• devised and implemented an email microservice to decouple the platform from the then only email service
provider
• devised and implemented new as well as significantly sped up (at least 400-fold) pre-existing data export (to
MS Excel) functionality
• sped up the RSpec test suite by about 23% by adopting a smarter database cleaning strategy

Lead Software Developer (full stack)

Tech lead and people manager of the Consumer team (8 – 10 developers); responsible for coordinating the development work across the Consumer function, managing processes and developer happiness
• managed to maintain an average of 99% uptime as the owner of the company's main web service (complaint- app)
• delivered the infrastructure for our first non-UK based operation (South Africa) while requirements kept shifting
• helping translate business requirements into technical specifications as well as stories and tasks while making
sure to continuously pay down our technical debt
• coaching and mentoring my team of junior to senior developers, removing any impediments to enable
everybody to do their best work, and shielding the team from unnecessary things such as office politics

Head of Development – Consumer Products

Tech lead of the Tools team; responsible for automating and supporting core development processes, e.g., deployment and testing; later responsible for developing and maintaining the Hivebench web app (Ruby, Ruby on Rails, AWS)

Highlights
• devised and implemented the in-house cloud deployment solution as a Ruby command line tool that all of Mendeley's web teams have adopted
• devised and implemented first version an in-house end-to-end testing service similar to BrowserStack
• taken over the organisation and hosting of the monthly Hackday (see awards)
• did the technical due diligence of the Hivebench web application that has lead to Elsevier's acquisition of Hivebench

Responsible for developing and maintaining XING’s Premium section as well as devising and implementing XING’s own self-booking advertising solution (Ruby on Rails, Perl)

Highlights
• helped increase traffic in the Premium section by 2.5% relative to total site traffic within four months
• implemented a birthday e-card feature used by hundreds of Premium users every day
• helped launch and run XING’s self-booking advertising solution that enabled all of the company 's 14 million users to become advertisers on the platform

Ruby on Rails Developer

Responsible for acquiring new customers and maintaining customer relationships; gathering and analysing customers’ business needs and technical requirements; quickly gaining expertise to meet customer and project requirements; devising and implementing software solutions as well as technical concepts; training designated users how to use the newly created IT systems (Ruby on Rails, Drupal, .NET, MS Silverlight)

Highlights
• built a Rails based project management system for a consultancy in the housing industry and urban development sector 
• implemented several company websites based on the CMS Drupal
• devised and built the prototype for a tactics teaching web app for ball games using MS Silverlight
• completed all projects on time and budget

Freelance Software Developer and IT Consultant

Responsible for the Calsync team; synchronising calendar data from partner websites and APIs with the Wimdu platform; building a reliable system of keeping calendar data for about 90,000 offers up to date, i.e., building a library to facilitate new integrations and an infrastructure to sync and monitor up to six syncs a day per partner; working closely with the Supply department to plan and prioritise new partner integrations; building and leading a team of four junior developers to integrate new partners and offers every day (Ruby, Sinatra, Ruby on Rails, Jenkins, AWS)

Highlights
• set up and maintained a data synchronisation platform from scratch
• improved the capture rate for the synchronised offers by 12.3% within six months, resulting in an additional six-figure turnover every month 
• enabled the Supply department to manage offers for already integrated partners themselves using tools tied into the Wimdu Rails application’s backend
• guided and mentored seven graduates / interns in regards to Ruby idioms specifically and, more generally, becoming better developers

Ruby Developer

Lucas Mbiwe

Connected more than 70 native speakers of English with schools in Southeast Asia seeking foreign teachers by automating social media marketing campaigns and application tracking to minimise repetitive manual work and make more time for genuine human connections.

TEFL GIGS (lead-gen for TEFL learning centres and Thai schools)

Building tech to help Filipino remote workers relocate to Thailand with confidence; AI-assisted visa application guidance and support backed by a custom CRM and marketing automation.

Personal details

Lucas M.

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