resumé resume cv curriculum vitae james beckett
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I am a highly experienced software engineering generalist with a wide variety of skills acquired over 30 years of industry experience, with emphasis on integration, interoperability, performance and security in some of the most demanding large-scale production environments including retail and high-stakes gaming. I have demonstrated strengths in investigative and analytic work, in heterogenous system architectures and complex debugging environments, and I have remained very hands-on throughout my career.
Driven by a long interest in software security, I instinctively champion secure design principles early in the engineering lifecycle. This has often made me a de-facto cross-team technical authority, providing guidance outside of my core role, and engaging positively with formal security governance and compliance. I've frequently brought to light, and addressed, specific vulnerabilities in design and implementation, as well as working with more routine assessment activities.
I've a longstanding enthusiasm for investigating and experimenting with diverse technologies outside my career responsibilities; my home lab ranges over reverse engineering, electronics interfacing, environmental data capture, telephony, remote control, cellular data, radio signal analysis, access control systems, visual processing, cryptography, JTAG data extraction, Android application development, cryptocurrencies, and service framework interfacing of many application areas. I have a keen interest in geodata and mapping, and contribute to various crowdsourced projects.
Flutter is a prominent global operator of online gaming and sports betting brands.
As part of a small Observability team, I have been working on implementation and integration of metrics collection, alerting and service-health mechanisms and application-specific management interfaces for ongoing releases of a large and heterogenous online gaming system. I've gained expert knowledge in industry-standard open-source tools, principally Grafana, Prometheus, Thanos, Loki and Opensearch, used within a sizeable estate of function- and maturity-separated deployments using Terraform and Salt in AWS.
Within a large SDLC function across multiple divisions and teams - business stakeholders, technology boards, interdependent development for product verticals, this has been a challenging environment through several corporate ownership and focus changes in two decades, with enterprise scale integration and migration projects.
A significant aspect of our work has been in planning and maintaining a mature security posture. As a team which pioneered Cloud-native operations within the company, we have been taken as models for subsequent InfoSec design and implementation. We have ongoing commitments to systems security analyses, vulnerability assessments and remdiation.
I take an active part in the Open Source community and contribute work back to projects whose software we use.
Key achievements
In a large team for Personal Area Networking technologies, I worked on defect resolution and profile implementation for the Bluetooth protocol subsystem in Symbian OS, including multimedia and Personal Area Networking, in a large and complex object-orientated component system, with extensive multithreaded debugging of the host layers of the protocol stack.
Projects included:
Cyan was an independent fabless semiconductor company producing a range of embedded microcontroller products.
I developed a new integrated help system in Cyan's IDE for their proprietary embedded microcontrollers, using Adobe presentation software in a Qt framework.
I also set up a certificate system to get a critical USB interface driver through the then-arduous Microsoft digital signing process.
I produced and maintained comprehensive utilities, reporting tools and process flow management for the backend systems generating catalog content for Amazon's extensive product websites, integrating layers from legacy file transfer to modern service frameworks and database configuration management.
I developed performance analyses for existing systems, and migrated data reconciliation algorithms from a legacy batch system to a low-latency streaming replacement.
This was a challenging role requiring tight adherence to SLA timescales in a continuous delivery production system for one of the most dominant and groundbreaking online retailers in the world, with complex team and department dynamics and high pressure to minimise downtime.
After departing Citrix I took the opportunity for an extended break from a full-time work environment. This gave me time to study for industry certifications (Java), learn about a few current and new technologies (XML, web services, J2EE) not exploited in previous projects, and work on unpaid software projects in the Internet community and for local clubs and charities. I also extended my home network, including ADSL and 802.11 wireless with firewall and other relevant security measures, and hosted (and continue to host) several web sites and services.
Projects and research included:
Here I did extensive localisation and internationalisation work for European and East Asian languages, driver-level emulation of graphics support, audio streaming and storage support for the Citrix thin-client display products on eight hardware platforms.
I was also responsible for liason with RedHat over our inclusion in their Applications CD release, and production of suitably packaged releases for delivery.
In the Resource Manager development team, I built user interfaces in early MVC frameworks, and back-end services for generating notifications over email, SMS and other channels.
Both periods included a full range of project lifecycle tasks, from influencing process guidelines and product requirement decisions, writing functional specifications and design documents, to writing module implementions.
I developed integrated debugging and other features for our groundbreaking runtime cross-compilers (technologies only much later coined by the industry as "JIT" and "adaptive optimisation") for multiple RISC editions of Microsoft Windows. I had prime responsibility for the DEC Alpha version and worked on-site at Microsoft in Redmond as Insignia's technical consultant in the weeks leading up to the release of the NT 4.0 Beta. I gained immersive knowledge of multiple CPU architectures and assembler-level development, analysis and debugging.
Later I developed network protocols and OS interfacing for filesystem access in thin-client products, and made stability improvements to a custom product license enforcement system based on FLEXlm.
Processing an ever-increasing flow of new malware, I produced many analyses and detection patterns/algorithms for integration with a monthly subscription software release. This consolidated my knowledge of assembly language and low-level systems processes and architecture including OS bootstrap, executable formats and hardware storage structures, most of which are still highly relevant today.
I provided 24/7 technical support for corporate and government customers with malware incidents.
I also designed and implemented various encryption products and libraries using C and assembler, including a bespoke international document transfer system for a UK agency using RSA Public-Key cryptography.
I regularly wrote articles for the industry magazine Virus Bulletin, gave presentations on security for the Civil Service College, conferences and trade shows, and assisted with training courses delivered by the company for IT security managers.
Full UK driving licence City & Guilds Radio Amateur Examination 1984 Red Cross First Aider at Work, Jan 1997, and First Aider at Insignia and Citrix. Fire Officer training (Sophos 1992 and Citrix 2001)
Computer technology is to me as much a hobby, pastime and toy as it is a career; many of my out-of-work activities involve use of computers. I maintain a number of web sites and work on software projects of my own or for Open Source initiatives. I regularly build and re-build my own machines, and maintain a home network of several hosts including Windows and Linux systems, DNS, mail and web servers, wireless infrastructure, with traffic and security monitoring.
I'm an active contributor to OpenStreetMap, a worldwide collaboration to create detailed royalty-free maps and map data, using GPS tracking, satellite imagery and photograph geocoding.
I have a keen interest in physical security, including CCTV, intrusion detection and access control.
I enjoy martial arts and have trained in Karate and Aikido, Shaolin Kung Fu, Tai Chi, Iaido and Aiki-jujitsu. I also enjoy target sports including field archery. I play and play-test various strategy, card, board and puzzle-solving games, both tabletop and on computers.
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