# Mike Raynham

# Contact

* mikeraynham@gmail.com | +44 7813 307561

# Summary

* Principal-level back-end and platform engineer and technical lead with deep experience building, modernising, and maintaining large, long-lived production systems.
* A disciplined advocate for comprehensive testing (including unit, integration, and characterisation suites run against real, ephemeral databases and browsers) with the full-stack depth to deliver everything from robust data structures to rich user interfaces.
* This expertise spans decoupling monolithic platforms into modern services using Rust (tokio/axum) and AI-directed Python on Google Cloud, as well as architecting complex systems like production knowledge-graph subsystems with incremental transitive-closure engines for DAGs in SQL.
* I apply this engineering judgement to scaling AI-assisted development safely, implementing rigorous guardrails like enforced fitness functions, contract testing, and strict CI gates to intercept 'plausible-but-wrong' generated code before it hits production.
* Based in the UK, looking for a fully remote, flexible role where technical leadership and a uncompromising approach to system correctness are valued.

# Technical Skills

* Languages (fluent, hand-authored): Perl, JavaScript (ES modules, statecharts, DOM), SQL (PostgreSQL & MySQL), Bash
* Languages (production): TypeScript (private-field classes, typed test suites), Rust (tokio/axum; hand-authored services)
* AI-directed delivery: Python services via spec-driven LLM orchestration: architecture, specification, review, and test governance (not hand-authored)
* AI / Agentic: LLM agent orchestration (Claude Code skills, plugins, MCP, Agent Teams), spec-driven development (IEEE 830 / EARS / Gherkin)
* Cloud: Google Cloud Platform (Cloud Run, Cloud Build, IAM, IAP, VPC, PSC, AlloyDB)
* Infrastructure: Terraform, Ansible, Docker, CI/CD pipelines, automated deployments
* Data & Streaming: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Apache Kafka, Debezium, Redis
* Frontend: XState statecharts (hierarchical, actor-model, history states), Svelte, graph visualisation (graphology/sigma), HTMX/server-rendered HTML, Rollup, monorepo workspaces
* Systems & Ops: Linux, Git, systemd
* Web: HTML/CSS, Apache HTTP Server

# Employment

## Situation Publishing
### December 2022 to present (Tech Lead)
### May 2017 to December 2022 (Senior Developer)

Lead engineer for the back-end systems powering The Register and the company's lead-generation platform, covering cloud architecture, legacy modernisation, and infrastructure automation.

* Cut call centre contact searches to near-instant by rewriting the lead-generation matching logic for a PostgreSQL-backed CRM, using denormalised, heavily indexed tables (B-tree, GIN trigram, tsvector), Redis per-campaign queues, and Kafka event logs.  All backed by a comprehensive suite of unit and integration tests executed against real, ephemeral databases.

* Designed and built a keyword knowledge-graph subsystem end to end: an incremental transitive-closure engine for directed acyclic graphs in SQL (implemented from the research literature as composable ORM components); a WordNet-backed search-term pipeline with a finite-state tokeniser, double-metaphone phonetic matching, word segmentation, and Unicode (NFKC) normalisation; and an XState/Svelte/sigma front-end for visual editing of the graph.

* Progressively decoupling legacy Perl logic by building modern API endpoints, automation utilities, and event-driven Kafka and Debezium pipelines.  All with thorough, multi-layered testing strategies.

* Built production Rust services (tokio/axum) to carve functionality out of the Perl monolith: a short-URL redirector with GeoIP routing, a Kafka-to-PostgreSQL lead pipeline, a database replication monitor, and a signature-verified SendGrid webhook handler.  Authored Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) Terraform for reproducible deployments.

* Directed AI agents, through my spec-driven development system, to build production Python services with clean architecture and comprehensive tests: a domain-driven CRM microservice replacing the legacy platform, and a Django/Wagtail CMS on Cloud Run/AlloyDB.

* Own the GCP estate as modular Terraform: 30+ services across Cloud Run, AlloyDB, Managed Kafka, Private Service Connect, Certificate Manager, and Cloud Build, with Packer image builds, Ansible/systemd deployment, and GitHub Actions CI/CD.

* Designing and optimising PostgreSQL/MySQL schemas and queries, and diagnosing system-wide production issues from databases to cloud services.

* Instrument services with OpenTelemetry and structured logging, and test against real, ephemeral databases and browsers (testcontainers, Playwright).

* Built an agentic development workflow where specialised LLM agents produce IEEE 830 specifications, refine them into EARS syntax and Gherkin scenarios, then validate generated code against the resulting BDD/TDD suite and bespoke LLM-oriented coding standards.

##  SpareRoom.co.uk
### August 2011 to May 2017 (Technical Lead)

Technical Lead for one of the UK's busiest flat-sharing websites, driving improvements to code quality, performance, scalability, and development processes.

Key achievements:

* Led the migration from managed servers to colocation, successfully switching live traffic to the new infrastructure with zero downtime and zero issues.  Refactored the codebase to remove years of hard-coded, hardware-specific configurations.  Built a highly available, HAProxy-fronted MySQL read-write and read-only replica architecture to support the move.  Used Puppet for fully reproducible server builds.
* Introduced Perl coding standards, code reviews, unit testing, and structured refactoring practices.
* Migrated version control from Subversion to Git.
* Improved scalability with memcached and Gearman; upgraded legacy Perl and MySQL systems.
* Built standardised development/testing environments using VirtualBox.
* Moved advert photo storage to AWS S3 behind EC2/ELB.
* Implemented HAProxy for front-end and database load balancing.
* Automated deployments using Perl, Rex, and Pinto.
* Led the migration of core search from MySQL to Sphinx Search, delivering major performance gains.

##  Self Employment
### August 2005 to August 2011

Freelance web development and IT support for small businesses, including building database-driven sites (Linux, Apache/nginx, MySQL, PHP, Perl), creating custom CMS platforms, and delivering bespoke data-processing utilities.

## Cheshire Building Society
### July 2001 to April 2003 (Technical Support Programmer)
### April 2003 to August 2005 (Infrastructure & Security Analyst)

Third-level support for critical systems, followed by infrastructure and security work covering disaster recovery testing and firewall maintenance.

## Building Design Partnership
### July 1996 to July 2001 (Third-Level Technical Support)

## Expert Systems Design
### July 1995 to July 1996 (Developer & On-Site Support)

## Atkins Odlin & Partners
### April 1992 to July 1995 (Computer Administrator & AutoCAD Technician)