We've been evolving our approach as we've grown, we're already seeing the benefits all across the business of the transformation. Now as we head into the new world we're continuing to grow our teams but we remain committed to our culture.
Our Culture Principles:
We're lucky to have leaders who believe in doing things the right way, that this is just how things should be done and want to provide the best possible environment for engineers. We’ve never believed in ivory tower leadership. Our leadership team are hands-on, roll up their sleeves when needed types, that mentor and support not only from a technical standpoint.
Chief Technology Officer
Damon joined UW at the beginning of 2016 as the company’s first Chief Technology Officer. He’s responsible for building UW's technology infrastructure and products to future-proof the company for our Partners, Members and staff, in an ever-changing digital landscape.
With an extensive 20-year technology career spanning both large companies and entrepreneurial early-stage startups, Damon transformed technology problems into new opportunities for many household names, including AT&T Interactive and Yahoo.
VP of Engineering
Mike joined UW in early 2016 to help kick start the transformation. Bringing a wealth of experience start-ups, fintech and consulting Mike's understanding of all things web has proved invaluable.
Damon's often described Mike as a Commando, there is no situation you can't drop him into. His fantastic ability to solve the hardest challenges blended with a relentless attitude has been fundamental in growing the engineering team and delivering the transformation to where we are today.
Chief Technical Architect
Martin joined UW late 2016 as Chief Technical Architect. With a number of successful years in tech leadership at the FT he brings a mobile first pedigree.
A firm believer is Event Sourcing, BDD and clean code, Martin has helped shape the modern architecture here at UW that has unpicked the previous monolith leading us to our cloud native approach.
We want to use the best tools for the job, our teams have autonomy but also take responsibility for technology choices. We value decoupling and avoid vendor lock-in at every opportunity. Our systems are eventually consistent, event sourced, designed after our business domain and deployed in a distributed, micro architecture.
By popular choice we are primarily a go house with frontend powered mostly by typescript rolled react/graphql duo; we like experimenting, there’s more rust and WASM coming up; but you will also find staples like python or java.
We’re into cloud native and kubernetes, if it Dockerizes it fits, some examples include: cockroachdb, tikv, pql, mongo for storage; kafka, nats for brokers; thanos, grafana, graylog for instrumentation; kustomize, kube-applier, traefik for deployment and operations.
If it can be open- sourced, it shall. If we can submit a PR instead of building our own, we will. Getting your hands dirty from the top to the bottom of the stack isn’t a promise to be broken, it’s a requirement. If you’re only good at parts of it that’s okay, we’ll support you getting good at all of it.