Andrew Patterson

Software Engineer with proven experience in the application of software engineering principles and methodologies to large, distributed, and sometimes complex, systems in investment banking and control systems. Additionally, I have past research experience in state of the art neural architectures and other machine learning paradigms such as BERT. I believe integrity, ethics, and adherence to principle is key to high-quality work.

My contact email address is andrewrpatterson@btinternet.com and my contact phone number is 07986791843. I am able to relocate where necessary.

Work Experience

Software Engineer | Morgan Stanley | October 2021 - present

  • Software Engineer developing a realtime client portfolio risk and margining system to primarily support the prime brokerage business.
  • Developed and tested low-latency Java services that processed millions of heterogenous trade events per day.
  • Designed and implemented a novel probabilitic model based testing approach using Apache Kafka for identifying and measuring regressions between systems.
  • Developed new scalable and resilient GraphQL APIs as part of full system stack development.
  • Improved system resilience and SRE capabilites by improving adoption of tooling such as Prometheus and Grafana and adapting where necessary.
  • Improved CICD workflow by expanding adoption of different devops tools and strategies such as Jenkins pipelines, Infrastructure as code, and blue-green deployment.
  • As collateral, I have further expanded my knowledge and understanding of Investment Banking and the Prime Brokerage business, especially within the bounds of a risk exposure context.

Software Engineer | Hymans Robertson | March 2020 - October 2021

  • Assisted actuaries and quantitative analysts in the development and testing of R based models used for investment risk modelling and pension liabilities forecasting.
  • Contributed to continuous improvement of product delivery using agile and lean methodologies.
  • Developed an automated process for portfolio optimisation using Azure’s batch processing platform.
  • Maintained several Azure-based API’s for exposing financial models to clients.
  • Led the development and integration of a bespoke code repository platform for sharing R packages and designed continuous integration/continuous deployment pipeline for doing so.
  • Organised and led engineering discussions for multiple projects remotely.

Machine Learning Research Associate | University of Strathclyde | November 2019 - May 2020

  • Continuation of my own postgraduate research but in a professional capacity.
  • Remit was to further explore novel ML architectures as an effective solution to the 30-day hospital readmission problem.
  • Developed robust and extensible framework for developing and evaluating transformer architectures at scale using high-performance compute (HPC) instances.
  • When presented at HealTac2020, approach scored above the previous state of the art.

Java Software Engineer | Ocado Technology | September 2019 - March 2020

  • Core platform team developing Ocado’s low-latency automation and control system found in the state of the art customer fulfilment centres.
  • Implemented new features for improving bot effectiveness and grid safety
  • Rigorous following of agile development processes including Scrum, Kanban, and test driven development (TDD)
  • Identified software design weaknesses using a data driven approach resulting in more maintainable code and improved KPIs.
  • Lead support role in team for deploying platform to kubernetes-based environments and liasoned with other engineering times to resolve production issues quickly.
  • Engaged in project management across the full agile scrum development cycle including sprint planning and retrospectives.
  • Practical experience using Cassandra, Elastic search, and Kibana for event logging.

Software Engineering Tutor | University of Glasgow | September 2015 - March 2016

  • Led classroom sessions for teaching object-oriented software development in Java to 30 students twice a week for two semesters.
  • Managed the incremental project-based assessments for each student including marking and grading, totaling 50% of their course grade.

Education

MSc Advanced Computing Science | Distinction | University of Strathclyde | 2019

  • Studied a variety of subjects including machine learning for software development and machine learning in finance.
  • Developed novel approach to predicting hospital readmission from clinical text with BERT, a large pre-trained langauge model, as part of my postgraduate thesis.
  • Gained work experience in a health analytics startup and collaborated with NHS health informatics researchers in diabetes for my postgraduate research thesis.

BSc(Hons) Computing | Second class | University of Glasgow | 2016

  • Received best project prize from Morgan Stanley for my project TweetDesk – a web application built around an event detection model for Twitter.
  • Designed and developed a distributed application using Apache Storm and Apache Kafka for the online classification and clustering of tweets for my final year project.
  • Co-authored short paper on visualizing twitter events which was published at ACM’s SIGIR 2014 conference.