Ben Davies

Lead a team of 6 engineers: planning, prioritisation, delivery and career development, while remaining hands-on with design and code

Own regulatory reporting and compliance services for 9 regulated markets, each with its own regulator and data formats, coordinating cross-team delivery of changes against fixed external deadlines

Own internal tooling used by teams across the business and by third parties in support of regulatory work

Deliver and operate services on Google Cloud, including Kubernetes workloads and BigQuery for reporting and analytics

Work directly with regulatory bodies across Europe and Latin America, analysing and providing feedback on proposed reporting services

Adopted an AI-first development workflow that keeps design, architecture and quality gating human-led, and advocated for it across my teams with success

Designed and built agentic AI tooling for software engineering within the department: agents, reusable skills and workflows that take on routine engineering work, with guardrails so they can be governed safely

Use GenAI for rapid prototyping, taking ideas from concept to working prototype in days; led the adoption of AI coding assistants (Sourcegraph, Cody, Claude, Atlassian Rovo, Opencode, Codex), delivering large day-to-day productivity gains and making junior engineers more autonomous

Mentor and develop engineers through ad-hoc support and dedicated regular 1:1s

Worked professionally with Java 8, 9, 17 and 21 using Spring and Jakarta CDI across a large legacy estate and new services

Proactively found and prevented security issues, from application bugs to configuration weaknesses

Solely responsible for implementing and managing an X.509 Certificate Authority and PKI used by the team; assisted with a similar company-wide service and mentored people across the business in PKI and certificate issuance

Championed state-of-the-art cryptography across a range of services, including an internally developed end-to-end encrypted file transfer service

Drove adoption of modern TLS and HTTPS features, including the rollout of HSTS to internal and customer-facing services

Led development and maintenance of a bespoke monitoring service deployed to hundreds of machines across multiple datacenters worldwide

Mentored junior colleagues on an ad-hoc basis and in dedicated weekly 1:1s

Owned the team's bespoke monitoring service and its roadmap

Owned the team's knowledge base; drove the migration from markdown in GitLab to Atlassian Confluence

Built and migrated regulatory reporting services supporting new market launches and changing compliance requirements

Built the team's bespoke monitoring service, later deployed to hundreds of machines across multiple datacenters

Assisted with Java modernisation work, upgrading services from Java 8 through 17 and migrating frameworks while maintaining legacy code

Delivered end-to-end features across several web products, working across backend and frontend

Maintained large legacy Java services: bug fixes, features and production support

Learned the regulatory domain, its regulators, reporting formats and compliance requirements

Built tooling and automation for build and deployment, laying the groundwork for later Ansible and infrastructure-as-code work