Leo Wheelan - Curriculum Vitae

With over 7 years of experience in challenging and high-growth environments, I bring a wealth of knowledge about building outstanding software products. I blend strong fundamentals in software design - particularly in working with distributed systems - with a genuine passion for solving end users' problems.

Experience

Senior Software Engineer - Onfido

June 2024 - present

Onfido provides identity verification services to many customers across various industries. In my time in the Document Capture team, I have:

• Collaborated with multiple teams to produce a plan to reduce the running costs of our services.
• Increased the roll-out of various features whilst ensuring our clear rate remains stable.

Staff Software Engineer - Birdie

April 2019 - June 2024

Birdie is a platform that provides digital care solutions for homecare agencies, offering tools and support for caregivers to enhance the quality of home care. During my tenure at Birdie I:

• Developed an event-sourced invoicing and payroll product from the ground up using a variety of technologies: F#, NodeJS, EventStoreDB, PostgreSQL, Kafka, React.
• Led multiple teams across the business to migrate PostgreSQL databases for several services from shared instances to separate instances, greatly increasing the reliability of each service.
• Built and maintained dashboards to ensure services were meeting SLOs/SLAs. Over the years this has exposed me to Kibana, Grafana, Prometheus, DataDog and latterly Honeycomb.
• Established solid observability principles amongst teams I worked with, coaching other engineers on what to look for during deployments and how to tune alarms.
• Mentored junior engineers to progress by identifying small, achievable improvements that contribute to their larger goals.
• Implemented CI/CD pipelines that would enable frequent and rapid deployment, including a micro-frontend architecture allowing individual teams to deploy frontend code at their own cadence.
• Ran multiple workshops to share knowledge with other engineers.

Software Engineer - Heed Software

January 2017 - March 2019

Heed provides a real-time communication platform, built to provide actionable messages and

• Worked across the stack to build a real time messaging app using NodeJS, RabbitMQ, MongoDB and WebSockets.
• Developed a workflow product to enable users to build automated, customised responses to certain events in their systems.
• Implemented a GraphQL API, allowing us to benefit from better typing and reduce overfetching.
• Developed a client-side Electron app serving our full SaaS product, plus extras, for premium customers.
• Worked on a mobile application to provide users with important alerts and notifications.

Education

MPhys (Hons), The University of Manchester

Graduated with upper second class honours with an overall grade of 68.5.

A-Levels, Petroc College, North Devon

• Mathematics: A*
• Physics: A
• Chemistry: B

Hobbies

In my spare time you can find me spending time with my beautiful wife and family. I've always loved music and play the piano, guitar and have recently started taking organ lessons.

I also love to read - currently I'm thoroughly enjoying Tom Holland's books on the ancient world.