Damien Allison

Damien is a highly experienced technical leader with extensive skills in systems architecture, product management and team management to deliver complex distributed systems addressing business needs. Damien is a big picture thinker who can work at an executive level to identify opportunities and drive their technical delivery. For the last few years Damien has worked as a technology lead / contract CTO delivering products turning over £X0M annually. Damien has experience recruiting both in house and out source technical teams with best in breed skills to deliver consistently on business needs. Before working in startups Damien has a solid track record in larger companies contributing to product strategy at companies including Google, eBay and Klarna. Damien also has experience as a technical contributor at other blue chip companies like BT, HP and Facebook. Communication Skills: Strong communicator both at a senior level translating business requirements into product strategy and technically as a team leader. Advised multiple non-technical startup founders. Successful startup pitches resulting in funding offers. Leadership and Team Management: Worked at a senior level to engage business partners in both startups and larger companies. Recruitment and outsource contract management. System Architecture: Extensive experience designing and implementing highly available applications architectures for real time, event-oriented and transactional systems. Tuning cloud deployments to fit price / performance expectations. Cloud Platforms: multi-platform environments with high uptime SLA utilising the right solution across Google, Rackspace and Amazon deployment environments. Java Development: Highly experienced developer of complex and highly concurrent or distributed solutions. Developer Coaching: Supported developers from junior to experienced with mentoring, code review, TDD and extreme programming to boost developer efficiency and delivery.