Michael Donat

In my role as VPE my focus has shifted towards establishing a scalable engineering management function for the long term.

Brought in and promoted a team of Heads of Engineering who’s daily focus is on growing teams, talent development, delivery, architecture and solidifying of our engineering culture.

As a member of the senior technology leadership team I played major parts in establishing the company strategic direction, portfolio investment and further improvement of the employee value proposition l. I’ve been a leading voice in enabling change to the business, ways the company operates and manages the employee base.

Joined UW as part of a new team to lead the business digital transformation. I was responsible for growing the engineering department from a small team operating UW's old legacy platform to a modern, 100 strong product team built on autonomy and end to end ownership of their product areas.

Initially focussed on bringing in new technology, replatforming, system design, and establishing the foundation of the new UW platform long term. Transitioned from a mix of proprietary/LAMP stack to an eventually consistent, event sourced, micro distributed architecture deployed in kubernetes with go-lang, typescript, react and react native as core building blocks.

Introduced and established an engineering lead culture with focus on agile and devops mindsets, switch from management to leadership, recruitment and onboarding strategies which lead to an environment engineers loved for being able to be productive, experiment with new technologies, learn and grow their careers, be trusted and most importantly have fun and satisfaction from their day to day.

Open source stack with staples including golang, typescript, react, react-native, graphql, grpc, kubernetes, docker, cockroachdb, kafka, protocol buffers and many more cloud native technologies.

Engaged to build an engineering team and deliver Moni’s money transferring platform from scratch. Work involved recruitment and management of cross-functional department, hands on development, support and dev-cycle facilitation.

Took charge of all aspects of team running, from day to day dev organisation, through to nurture of company-wide engineering culture - all while staying close to technology and contributing hands on whenever possible.

Work resulted in creation of highly agile and disciplined team with quality and testing as the very first principle - code was deployed frequently, free of bugs with nearly 100% coverage via outside-in TDD/BDD, continuous delivery and peer reviews.

Technology stack consists of: aws, docker, ansible, php, symfony, node.js, javascript, react.js, android, ios.

Brought in to integrate recently acquired e-learning platform. Work included upgrade of open source software (symfony stack), migration to new data centre, implementation of build automation and enough refactoring to allow the system to be stable under load.

Took charge of IBIs growing ecommerce platform - turning around a long failing project (Magento) as well as ensuring all web payment systems are in line with PCI DDS regulations.

Acted as an agile coach, working with development teams within the division on their engineering culture and practices. Introduced concepts such as agile/lean development, continuous integration, test/behaviour driven development and devops.

Responsible for overhauling legacy in-house entertainment platform. Both, customer and operator facing applications have been upgraded from PHP4 to PHP5 bringing in a new flavour of MVC framework with component distribution and clean separation of concerns. Central repository has been created to take data from operator facing systems and make it available as a unified set for customer applications. This work resulted in a creation of distributed and highly scalable application ecosystem where assembling variety of new products based on existing capabilities became extremely easy.

Duties included development of reporting systems for insurance resellers as well as training development team in programming techniques such as OOP, it's principles and best practices, webservices and server configuration.

Responsible for delivery of a podcasting platform prototype as well as various other projects for external clients. Work included design and execution of what at the time was one of only few websites capable of recording/serving both audio and video user content.