Joseph Wynn

Engineering Team Lead and Principal Software Engineer
020 4133 6948 | joseph@wildlyinaccurate.com | github.com/wildlyinaccurate

Full stack engineering leader with 15+ years of experience building & scaling distributed systems and leading cross-functional teams. Skilled in real-time data processing pipelines, query abstraction layers, and high performance web platforms.

Experienced working at every layer of the web stack: database, backend, API, frontend, CDN/edge, and developer tooling. Proven track record of estimating, planning, and delivering complex software projects with teams of all sizes.

Overview

Languages: Rust, TypeScript/JavaScript, Python, SQL, PHP

Platforms: Fastly Compute, Heroku, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Data stores: MariaDB/MySQL, PostgreSQL, Amazon Redshift, SQLite

Workflow: Git, Docker, Jenkins, CircleCI, GitHub

Team lead: 5-10 direct reports, 50+ indirect reports

Experience

SpeedCurve | Head of Engineering

2020—present (Christchurch, Remote)

Expanded the engineering team and migrated from a monolithic app on dedicated hosting to a service-oriented architecture in AWS.
Scaled the real user monitoring (RUM) pipeline to handle 150M events per day and allow real-time querying of 10TB of data.
Designed and built a database abstraction layer (DBAL) that simplifies querying & aggregating various data sources, enabling new dashboards & visualisations to be deployed easily.
Conducted regular one-on-one meetings with team members to provide support and help with career progression.
Worked directly with clients and stakeholders to ensure technical direction aligned with business goals.

Experience (continued)

SpeedCurve | Principal Software Engineer

2017—2020 (Christchurch, Remote)

Rewrote SpeedCurve's RUM data collection in TypeScript after building a test harness with nearly 100% coverage.
Migrated ETL processes to Rust, improving performance and maintainability.
Used code generation techniques including self-modifying code to build highly-optimised SQL for generating correlation charts.
Built a library of modular front-end components using techniques that I pioneered at the BBC.
Improved overall infrastructure reliability and reduced on-call events by 96%.

BBC News | Principal Software Engineer

2014—2017 (London)

Migrated from on-premise to cloud infrastructure, developing a new component-as-a-service architecture serving 38M users per day.
Led the team responsible for building and deploying pages that were 50% faster.
Built a revamped CI pipeline that enabled teams to move from weekly deploys to several deploys per day.
Transitioned to a team lead role, focusing on building and supporting a self-sufficient team who worked efficiently together.

Rightster | Senior Software Developer

2013—2014 (London)

Helped to build second generation video distribution platform, co-ordinating feature development with other teams.
Worked closely with product and architecture teams to ensure feature development was meeting specifications.
Implemented a Git workflow that helped to reduce the chaos of multiple teams working on the same source code.

Various | Software Developer

2007—2013 (Christchurch, London)

Software development at various agencies. Built a tourism booking portal, a buy & sell platform, a real-time racing odds checker, and much more.
Built websites for some of the UK's largest magazine brands, using complex caching strategies to handle high traffic demands.

Interests

Outside of my professional work I maintain several open source projects. I like to spend my free time surfing, rock climbing, running, and spending time with my dogs. Work-life balance is important to me, and I strive to ensure that everyone on my team can enjoy the same balance that I want for myself.

Writing

I mostly write on The Structured Thoughts & Wildly Inaccurate blogs, although some of my longer pieces have been turned into e-books. Here are a few my most popular pieces:

A Hacker's Guide to Git (2014) – A look at Git from the inside-out, explaining how simple building blocks come together to enable a powerful version control system.
Becoming a Team Lead: A Survival Guide (2018) – Learnings and advice from my personal journey of developer to team lead. Originall given as a talk at O'Reilly Fluent 2018.
Let's Build a Virtual DOM Library (2023) – Demystifying VDOM frameworks by building one from scratch.

Open Source

Below are a few of my open source projects. You can find the rest of them on GitHub.