Dan Palmer — Software Engineer

Experience

Google — Android SRE — Sydney  – Software Engineer (Site Reliability Engineering), April 2024 — Present

I moved to Sydney to join and help train a newly forming Android SRE team, bringing my experience with the Android ecosystem and Google's server development technologies. I'm a squad leader, running a project to improve incident response time for first party Android apps across Google.

Google — Google Play — London  – Software Engineer, January 2022 — April 2024

During my time at Google in the UK, I was responsible for serving downloads of apps users of Google Play and app developers. My work crossed the stack, from apps (Play Store) to backend servers and infrastructure, analytics and experimentation. I own the technical roadmap for download improvements and acted as tech lead for junior engineers working on these areas.

Thread  – Software Engineer, June 2014 — December 2021

During my 7.5 years at Thread I worked on technology behind every part of the business. When leaving as a Senior Software Engineer, I was responsible for the technical architecture of our services and improving how we work as engineers.

Throughout my time at Thread I was trusted to deliver large projects independently, including...

  • Tech lead for new business line, white-labelling of Thread app and service for an international clothing brand. Started in March 2020. Responsible for overall architecture and technical outcome. Implemented partner integration and backend, involved in iOS implementation.
  • Tech lead for cloud migration, moving Thread services from "bare-metal" machines to Google Cloud Platform.
  • Responsible for delivering business critical strategic projects related to fundraising and compliance.
  • Modernising payment processing to support EU Strong Customer Authentication legislation, on a 6 week deadline.
  • Architecting and implementing the first API, using GraphQL, for a new iOS app. Subsequently used across all frontends.

Also a core part of the hiring team for engineering roles, and continued to be deeply involved in product iterations and the direction of the engineering team. Involved in new-hire training across the company.

Coefficient  – Senior Software Engineer (Contract), May 2020 – September 2020 (Part Time)

Supported data scientists and client development teams with code review and turning prototypes into production-ready code to support core business operations. Rapidly built out website and internal tools for training course booking, with a custom CMS, checkout and payments.

MWR InfoSecurity  – Security Research and Development, Summer 2013

Built a new security product from idea to fully featured prototype in order to explore a new potential business opportunity for the company. This was successful and development continued, being spun out into a new company – Countercept, growing to around 100 people before being acquired along with MWR by F-Secure in 2018.

Found critical vulnerability in a well-known communication app, as part of a penetration testing project. Reviewed and approved the client's fix.

Assisted in incident response for an attack by a suspected "Advanced Persistent Threat" actor, analysing a piece of malware to reverse engineer the cryptography being used by it.

GoSquared  – Software Engineer, Summer 2012

Re-built backend services for real-time visitor stats in web analytics and introduced new unit-testing framework to the team. Services built with Node.js and Redis. Completed technical evaluation of Cassandra for analytics storage.

Realmac Software  – Software Engineer (Intern), Summer 2011

Contributed to in-house frameworks that were shared between several applications, and helped put the finishing touches on Analog prior to release. Focused mainly on client-side integrations with webservice APIs such as Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon S3, working in Objective-C for macOS.

Qualifications

MEng Computer Science with Mobile and Secure Systems
University of Southampton, First class honours (2010-2014)

  • Programming Principles: 92%
  • Secure Systems: 82%
  • Winner of 3rd Year Netcraft Prize

Talks

Skills

Technical

  • Currently using Java on Android and Go on the backend, as well as cloud services and internal Google tooling.
  • Professional expertise in Python, Django, Kubernetes, Swift, Javascript, React and Git.
  • Significant experience building and evolving Continuous Integration and Delivery processes.
  • Experience using Postgres and Redis in production.
  • Previously worked on Objective-C, C# .NET MVC, Elm, and Node.js codebases on professional projects.
  • Some experience with Haskell and Ruby for personal projects.
  • Knowledge of, and interest in, computer security issues, including finding an account takeover vulnerability in GitHub and information disclosure vulnerability in Django (CVE-2020-13254).

Non-Technical

  • Strong emphasis on empathy, candour and clarity in communication.
  • Extensive experience with code review and defining code review culture.
  • Experience in hiring for software engineering roles and designing interviews and hiring processes.
  • Experience with project management tools, bug tracking and testing feedback.
  • Experience working in an environment with constant re-prioritisation of work.
  • Keen and able to learn new problem domains quickly.

Contact

You can contact me at cv@danpalmer.me.

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