About

Work Experience

Summary of key career achievements:, Various Start-ups, SMEs, and Large enterprises

Jan 1996 - Present 25 years 8 months

• > 25 years of experience with software engineering.
• > 15 years of experience with technical leadership & architecture.
• > 7 years of people management experience (> 20 direct/indirect reports).
• > 22 years of commercial experience coding in multiple languages, specializing more on the Microsoft stacks (such as .Net, Blazor, ASP.Net Core, Azure, SQL, etc).
• Multiple years of experience managing remote teams.
• Experienced in designing, building and deploying secure, scalable services.
• Took over the role of Head of Software Engineering and turned around a completely dysfunctional software engineering department, within just 6 months.
• Instilled cultures of craftsmanship and drove adoption of best practices & processes.
• Mostly involved in greenfield projects, creating or using cutting-edge technologies.
• Developed or improved the architecture of numerous complex systems.
• Designed and built cutting-edge, high-throughput, event-driven SaaS platforms.
• Redesigned multiple systems, increasing their performance by orders of magnitude.
• Envisioned, designed, and built a platform that modernized all products in a company.
• Rescued a strategic offshore project from being abandoned, saving over 5 years of development time and effort while enabling a new revenue stream.
• Undertook several successful entrepreneurial ventures from an early age.

Senior Engineering Manager, Axway

Jun 2018 - Oct 2020 2 years 5 months

Covered two major product areas: API Management & Application Integration.

• Managed multiple teams, using diverse cutting-edge technologies and patterns such as SaaS, Microservices, Kubernetes, Cloud (AWS & Azure), Low-code/No-code, DevOps with Infrastructure-as-code, and Docs-as-code.
• Drove multiple initiatives to improve the software development process, achieving 4x improvement in lead time while also improving quality.
• Worked closely with Directors, Product Managers, Product Owners, and other leaders to plan, prioritize, and drive value creation while mitigating risks.
• Heavily involved in interviewing numerous Software Architects, Product Owners, Quality Managers and Senior Software Engineers to grow the organization.

Senior Software Architect & Software Development Manager, Asavie (part of Akamai)

Jan 2016 - Dec 2017 2 years

Responsible for the design, creation, and management of Asavie's E-commerce platform, which sells secure IoT connectivity on-demand. https://www.asavie.com/secure-iot-connectivity-marketplace/

• Defined the architecture and processes for the E-commerce platform, and related projects, using cutting-edge technologies and practices such as DDD, Event-driven Microservices using CQRS & Event storming, Azure ServiceFabric, ASP.NET Core, Azure Cloud, DevOps with Infrastructure-as-code, SaaS, and CI/CD.
• Built the E-commerce/Platform team from the ground up and managed them through the successful completion of the project, as well as the creation of AsavieID.
• Responsible for initially running the E-commerce production environment - Used LiveOps/DevOps and CI/CD principles & practices to safely deploy to production multiple times per day, thus reducing time-to-market as well as overall risk.
• Senior Software Architect (and acting Technical Product Manager) for internal foundation services (Identify Management/SSO, messaging, encryption, etc.).
• Laid the foundations for a robust, reactive, event-driven, microservices ecosystem.
• Significantly improved the software development processes & tooling.
• Investigated what it would take to completely rebuild Asavie's public REST API.
• Helped grow the company in a High-Performance Startup environment, by conducting interviews for the best engineers possible.

Principal Software Engineer & ScrumMaster (R&D), Aspect Software

Oct 2012 - Sep 2015 3 years

Led multinational R&D teams (Ireland, USA, China and India), trailblazing new ideas through research projects and building prototypes.

• Concentrated on creating cutting-edge event-driven systems that enabled Complex Event Processing and Real-time Analytics & Reporting.

Senior Systems Analyst & Software Engineer, Alexander Forbes Group Holdings

May 2010 - Sep 2012 2 years 5 months

• Redesigned key backend system, achieving 50x increase in performance - Large-scale and complex ETL process accelerated from 24-72+ hours to only 15-30 minutes.
• Collaborated with the leaders of multiple business units to automate the creation and posting of claims letters, replaced the need for an entire department.

Head of Software Engineering & Enterprise Architect (Group IT), Paycorp Group

Jun 2009 - May 2010 1 year

Performed the dual roles of Head of Software Engineering and Enterprise Architect. Led the entire Software Development function for the group, by working closely with the Managing Directors of the 5 different businesses.

• Corrected significant pre-existing issues. Instilled culture of quality & craftsmanship.
• Restructured entire software development process. Initiated training and mentoring.
• Setup system to correctly prioritize work coming from the 5 different companies.
• Introduced Kanban, Scrum and XP Agile practices.
• The above actions resulted in the complete reversal of the significant pre-existing staff attrition problem, bringing it down to zero and stabilizing the environment.
• Prepared the group companies for their first PCI-DSS audit. Set up fraud prevention mechanisms, audit trails, encrypted communications and eliminated many security and process issues, resulting in PCI-DSS accreditation and new business.
• Coordinated a B2B initiative, on-boarding a major bank (Santam) as a new partner.
• Defined software design guidelines and standards for the organization.
• Guided the architecture and design of all software systems.
• Was actively involved in recruiting and interviewing all new staff members.
• Designed and created a real-time SMS notification system for user account activities.

Team Lead (Group IT), Paycorp Group

Apr 2009 - Jun 2009 3 months

Led and mentored engineers from very diverse skill sets and cultural backgrounds.

• Corrected crippling flaws in vital business systems, enabling accurate automated interbank settlements for the first time in years, thus reducing manual overheads.
• Initiated and successfully executed a coordinated plan to eliminate the root causes of recurring defects affecting thousands of account balances.
• Improved the performance of numerous key business systems by as much as 100x - mainly by redesigning multiple databases and stored procedures.
• ATM communicator: Created new software system that eliminated the need for expensive 3rd party software and rooms full of hardware.
• Personally performed essential data recovery operations, over Easter weekend and within the first week of work, that allowed ATM solutions to remain in business after a hard drive failed (containing their primary SQL database - no backups available).

Team Lead (Real-time reporting systems), Derivco / Microgaming

Mar 2008 - Mar 2009 1 year 1 month

Managed staff KPIs. Mapped and tracked team deliverables. Defined product architecture.

• Managed the creation of a web-based real-time reporting system, integrating it with the PCM platform (mentioned below).
• Was separately also a key member of a special task force, which was assembled to rescue a strategic project. The performance of this Affiliate Marketing System was improved by many orders of magnitude, significantly increasing its capacity from only being able to handle a handful of players to handling millions of players, thus saving 5 years' worth of offshore development effort while enabling a new revenue stream.

Software Developer 2 & ScrumMaster, Derivco / Microgaming

Mar 2007 - Mar 2008 1 year 1 month

• Created Player Communication Manager [PCM]: A high throughput SaaS Call Centre Management Platform built using an event-driven microservices (SOA) architecture with advanced real-time web front-ends, that enabled hundreds of online casinos to communicate with millions of players in real-time. This project directly resulted in >10% increase in total revenue for Microgaming (millions of dollars).
• Created Player Tracker: Real-time event-driven tracking of millions of players, as they moved through hundreds of different Microgaming games and systems.
• Learnt Flash and built PCM Health Monitor as a pet project. It currently provides real-time visually interactive status monitoring for the numerous PCM servers, databases and other software components. Resulted in early fault-detection, as well as much quicker recovery times, greatly improving system stability and uptime.

Software Developer 1, Derivco / Microgaming

Oct 2006 - Mar 2007 6 months

• Created a custom localization system, which significantly reduced translation costs by standardizing and simplifying translation and globalization work.
• Constructed a loyalty management platform for 400+ online casinos, increasing their player retention and revenue.
• Enhanced Microgaming's core banking system to support multiple currencies and languages, thereby allowing them to capture new international markets (such as Asia & South America) ahead of industry crippling legislation by the USA.

Technical lead (Platform), Securities and Trading Technologies

Jan 2005 - Sep 2006 1 year 9 months

Reported directly to the Technical Director. Was the Technical lead / Architect for the next generation platform for application development, which was used to move all the new (and most existing) products from Delphi to C# .Net

• Provided guidance to multiple teams during the re-engineering of the legacy systems from Delphi to C# .Net.
• Presented numerous training courses on the new platform, and on C# in general.
• Conceived of and built an automated application delivery system (a few years ahead of MS ClickOnce), which greatly simplified the deployment of application updates for all the systems built on top of the new 'Shell platform'.
• Following from the above success, designed the low-level/high-performance TCP messaging protocols for the combined STT & Accenture Johannesburg Stock Exchange trading engine project.

Entrepreneur, Self-employed

Jan 1992 - Jan 2005 13 years 1 month

• 2017-11 to 2018-06: Learnt about blockchains, arbitrage, and how to day trade. Applied Technical Analysis to trade on multiple cryptocurrency markets. Started building a real-time, event-driven, automated arbitrage and trading system.
• Age 19: Created robotics control and management software for Ford and Mazda - Automated the entire physical vehicle phosphate coating process in South Africa.
• Age 14 to 18: Built bespoke software systems and websites for numerous businesses.
• Age 11 to 12: Ran a small model toy business (with 3 full-time employees). Designed, manufactured, and sold functional toy cannons (that used fireworks as ammunition).
• Age 9: Learnt to program and created software to manage a commercial chicken farm (as well as some games).

Skills

• Architecture (advanced): SaaS Event-driven Real-time systems Cloud computing (Azure & AWS) Microservices CQRS APIs Distributed systems Scalability
• Leadership & Management (advanced): Mentoring Coaching Process Improvement Interviewing Performance / HR Hands-on technical leadership Creative problem solving
• Software Engineering / Software Development (advanced): Full-stack Polyglot with preference for the .Net stack C# IoT CI/CD Performance Craftsmanship
• Project management (advanced): Agile Kanban Scrum XP MVP to Production Stakeholder management Forecasting Risk mitigation

Education

• BSc IT/CompSci: Software Engineering, Bachelor,  University of South Africa

  Jan 2002 - Jan 2007

  Artificial Intelligence Advanced Systems Development Advanced Programming Operating System and Architecture Database Design and Implementation Usability (UX / HCI) Principles of Databases Project Management

References

Mark Mullane - Director Of Engineering at Asavie

Gordon is one of the smartest people I've worked with, who brings fantastic attention to detail and a great work ethic to everything he does. The more complex and tricky the task or project at hand, the more Gordon excels. He is that rare breed of engineer who is truly cross-functional and who can appreciate and understand the viewpoints of all project stakeholders. This combination of big-picture, critical and innovative thinking is what marks Gordon out. He is someone who you can trust to get the right thing done, and to get it done right.

Hugo Cardos - Group Software Development Manager at Alexander Frobes

Gordon has excellent technical credentials, he is a critical thinker and often applies his mind and talents to problems that are ordinarily difficult to solve. Whilst working together with him, I often relied on him to produce high quality work and sound technical solutions.

Alexandre Souza - Senior Software Engineer at Asavie

I have worked with Gordon Rudman for more than a year. I was the first to be hired, as Senior Software Engineer, under his management at the time and we kept like that for a couple of months until other members joined the team. Those initial months, having Gordon’s dedicated time was good as he clarified my initial doubts and proper presented me with the plan the company had for the following Quarters. During the time I worked with Gordon, I realized that he has a vary of strong skills, from defining software architecture to managing and mentoring people. Nowadays I realized I had a different level of professionalism, I wasn’t mature as I am now as a Software Engineer and I thank you Gordon for this. I took Gordon as my mentor and while working with him I have learned very important lessons in how to deal in certain situations, deal with people and their skills and how to always try to be my best, not only in the technical level but as a person and professional in general. At the time I worked with Gordon, we defined a Microservice Architecture using Event-Sourcing and CQRS to implement an e-commerce application, it was in a fast pace Agile development environment where he drove and mentored us to drive design meetings, sprint reviews, product presentations also manage POs and PMs expectations. He showed to be worried about our career goals and directions and he was always trying to help us, at his best, to achieve our goals. I am sure he will be an outstanding addition to any team and I would definitely work with him again.

Alessandro Pacileo - QA Manager at Asavie

It's not very often that you get to work with a professional with a ridiculously high level attention and effectiveness when it comes to manage development operations and documentation; When working on QA Automation it is vital to get as much information and in as straightforward as possible fashion from the dev teams, and that's exactly what I got, faultlessly, any time I interacted with teams managed by Gordon. Working for Asavie Technologies Ltd. in Dublin, I had the pleasure to collaborate with Gordon on a number of projects including e-Commerce and 'Internet of Things' platform development; I am not exaggerating when I say his attention and efficiency made my job way easier than it could have been providing clear and well organized code, linear and understandable requirements and documentation and open, flowing collaboration. This made writing automated test cases for projects whose development was managed by Gordon as smooth as a process as it can be. His technical knowledge as well as his development process organization skills also proved very important in a cross-team scenario, where Gordon greatly helped researching and spearheading the adoption of a number of workflow improvements - from a bug reporting system to automated cloud deployment on Microsoft Azure. Equally impressive is his grasp on 'real world scenarios', which helped to preemptively avoid some issues that could, in time, have turned fairly problematic. As a development manager and colleague, Gordon earns my highest recommendation.

Many more references available on LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gordonrudman/

Languages

English (Native speaker: 1st) Afrikaans (Native speaker: 2nd)