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Ikenna is a Father (of 3), Husband and senior technologist. He has 18+ years of experience working to create web application software.
He has solved real world problems with practical yet elegant user-centred solutions based on business priorities.
He is pragmatic and subscribes to agile, pair programming (where required), behaviour driven development (BDD), DRY, progressive enhancement, and open source approaches to web software development.
He is looking forward to helping the team at <> contribute value to <> and its clients
Hands-on software development, Strategic R&D, and Product Engineering Leader (19+ years) driving innovation, scalable architecture, and continuous improvement across B2B and B2C SaaS.
Proven player-coach: Cuts release cycles (-75%), defects (-20%), and infrastructure costs (-18%) through cloud-native CI/CD, high-performance culture, and data-driven decision-making.
Technical Breadth: Hands-on with Rust, Go, Python, Java, JavaScript, and Ruby; fluent in Terraform & Ansible.
Innovation: Passionate about clean code, mentoring developers, and exploring AI-driven engineering (LLMs & vibe coding) to boost productivity and creativity.
Leadership: Certified Software Architect and Scrum Master with a track record of owning $1.3M engineering budgets and leading multi-team organizations to deliver customer-centric outcomes.
Hands-on Development, Strategic R&D & Technical Leadership: Defining technical vision, development strategy, long-term technology planning, architectural design, and problem-solving.
Team Leadership & Empowerment: Building, mentoring, and leading high-performance engineering teams.
Process Optimization & Innovation: Implementing efficient processes (Agile, Scrum, TDD, BDD, CI/CD) and scalable tools.
Cross-Functional Collaboration & Stakeholder Management: Partnering effectively with Product, QA, DevOps, Design, and business stakeholders.
Product Delivery & Project Management: Managing full SDLC for timely releases.
Financial Acumen: Proficient in project scope evaluation and cost estimation.
Principal Software Developer
Scribes & Shekel | Canada / Remote | January 2023 – Present
Scribes & Shekel offers technical consulting and full-stack product engineering services to startups and global organizations.
Product Leadership & Experimental Development: Led end-to-end architecture and delivery for Siggle-app, a CRE document OCR + AI extraction platform, implementing systematic experiments to resolve technological uncertainties in document parsing, confidence calibration, and pipeline throughput (SR&ED-aligned).
Real-Time Systems Innovation: Directed development of RideMate, a real-time ride-sharing platform, resolving concurrency and scalability uncertainties in driver–rider matching algorithms; designed repeatable load-testing experiments to validate performance at high concurrency.
Technical Leadership & Architecture: Spearheaded backend and cloud strategy across platforms using Rust, Golang, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, Redis, and Kafka, ensuring resilience, scalability, and security.
Cross-Functional Engineering: Led distributed teams across mobile (Flutter), backend (Rust, Go, Node.js), and DevOps to deliver high-performing, user-centered digital experiences.
CI/CD & QA Automation: Implemented BDD pipelines with Ginkgo/Gomega, increasing QA coverage by 30% and reducing release friction.
Infrastructure Modernization: Executed cloud migration for BensFriends.org, reducing hosting costs by 25% via CI/CD automation and observability dashboards.
Strategic Advisory: Provided fractional-CTO guidance on technical governance, AI integration, accessibility, and privacy compliance.
Tech Lead / Senior Software Developer
Maisonette | New York, USA (Remote) | June 2021 - January 2023Maisonette is a large e-commerce marketplace for kids' products built on Ruby on Rails / Spree / Solidus.
Led daily software development operations and shaped strategy for timely e-commerce application releases.
Cultivated a high-performance Agile team culture and mentored junior developers.
Achieved 20% defect reduction and improved deployment speed via continuous delivery.
Drove customer satisfaction increases through integration and feature optimization.
Senior Developer (Tech Lead)
WestGrid | British Columbia, Canada | June 2018 - June 2021
Architected scientific gateways and proteomics portals (Python, Flask) in collaboration with research teams.
Directed and mentored co-op students in software development, TDD, and Agile methodologies.
Improved engineering processes with deployment scripts (Terraform, Ansible).
Senior Ruby Developer
Marks & Spencer (Venture Labs) | London, UK | Feb 2018 - June 2018
Drove 30% increase in application quality through comprehensive testing strategies.
Enhanced customer satisfaction by 6% with express delivery slot feature; improved inventory tracking accuracy by 5%.
Achieved 50% speed improvement for CSV imports (AWS S3) and 30% speed increase for data exports.
Senior Ruby Developer
Tusker Direct | Watford, UK | Oct 2017 - Feb 2018
Contributed to critical pricing/data back-office application.
Designed and developed an in-house RabbitMQ Producer/Consumer gem using Protocol Buffers.
Senior Ruby Developer
Government Digital Service (GDS) | London, UK | Feb 2016 - Sept 2017
Led contributions to policy changes, new features, and bug fixes for high-traffic Smart Answers and CPM Ruby on Rails repositories, impacting millions.
Maintained 39 government policies/calculators and collaborated with content designers and policy experts.
Senior Ruby Developer
Public Health England | London, UK | Mar 2015 - Dec 2015
Key role in strategic C# to Ruby on Rails migration; developed complex National Cancer Audit Reports.
Mentored C# and junior Ruby developers on Rails.
Software Developer / Engineer
Various Companies | UK & USA | Apr 2006 - Feb 2015
Delivered scalable applications across government, health, crowdfunding, and education sectors using Ruby on Rails, .NET, and Java EE.
Early work included enterprise projects for logistics management, data analytics, and API integrations.
Developed cross-functional expertise in API design, Elastic Search, web services, and test-driven development.
Built foundations in full-stack engineering, Agile collaboration, and mentoring junior engineers, paving the way for subsequent leadership roles.
EDUCATION
Pg.D Computer Science - The University of Hertfordshire, 2011
B.Sc. (Hons) Business Information Systems (1st Class) - The University of East London, 2010
Sun Certified: Enterprise Architect, Business Component Developer, Web Component Developer, Programmer (Java EE/SE), 2008
Nice things people have said about me
Chris Wolf, Co-Founder & Director at Wolf&Player:
"I worked with Ikenna during his brief time as a Software Engineer at Matt&George. I did not line manage Ikenna directly but was PM on many projects that Ikenna worked on.
I found Ikenna to be a very good team player. He is friendly and brings a good positive attitude to the working environment. He is highly skilled in the programming languages he focuses on and also displayed a willingness to learn new skills turning his hand to a range of technologies he had no prior experience of prior to joining.
I would recommend Ikenna to any organisation as a developer who can translate requirements and deliver effectively."
Leena Gupte, Tech Lead at the UK Government Digital Service:
"Ikenna is a hard-working member of the team who does not shy away from difficult challenges but instead tackles them with a great deal of enthusiasm. He came to a project that most other developers at GDS don't want to touch because the code-base has been left in an awful condition.
This code-base is one of the ones used by GOV.UK provide citizens with answers to questions they may have about how they can interact with government. Ikenna, through his diligence, makes continual improvements to this code so that it is less onerous for the next developer to pick up, and easier to update, so that UK citizens can continue to receive up to date information in a timely manner.
Outside of GDS, Ikenna spends his time keeping abreast of all of the changes that occur in Ruby on Rails and is a valued member of the Ruby on Rails community.
Ikenna doesn't just limit himself to Ruby. He is also keen to try new technologies and has taught himself about container management and other programming languages.
Ikenna doesn't just keep this knowledge to himself though. He willingly shares what he has learned by giving talks to the wider tech communities and contributing to open source projects.
I am sure that Ikenna will continue to contribute to the technology community in all of these ways and will be a valued member of any digital technology team he joins in the future, and by doing this will continue to positively impact the UK digital economy."
Wendy Devolder, Founder & CEO at Skills Matter Ltd:
"Ikenna is one of the most passionate technologists I know. Loves learning.."
For a full recommendations with more details, please see my profile on LinkedIn.
