DANIEL WILLIAM CLARKE
SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER

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About Me

I’m a Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer with over a decade of experience, and a fledgling business owner, combining technical expertise and leadership skills honed while guiding teams of up to seven engineers. I specialize in cloud computing, microservices, asynchronous architecture, and observability. My career has spanned a diverse range of projects, from cloud-based software and engaging games to intricate simulations and user-centric websites. Currently, I hold the position of Senior Software Engineer at Loveholidays, the fastest-growing travel agency in the UK, applying my skills to a new and exciting domain 🛫.

Alongside my full-time role, I run The Sauce Forge, my side business where I channel my passion for crafting unique hot sauces and related products. I’ve built the entire brand from the ground up, utilizing Next.js, Contentful, and Stripe to power a seamless website and checkout experience. Navigating business setup, FSA regulations, and crafting a product line from homegrown ingredients is a challenge I embrace with enthusiasm. My journey with The Sauce Forge is not just about creating great flavors, but also about applying my engineering skills to build a customer-centric, innovative brand.

Outside of my professional work, I enjoy spending my time doing any of the following:

👨‍👩‍👧 Being the best dad I can be is my foremost interest

🌶️ Growing my own produce, and fermenting my own hot sauces, sauerkrauts and Kimchi

🧰 Building up my carpentry and DIY skills

🥙 Cooking new and interesting meals for my family

🦀 Learning the Rust programming language

🔮 Playing Magic the Gathering

My Experience

October 2024 - Present (1 year)

The Sauce Forge

Owner

Start up
Entrepreneur
Sauce Business

Crafting fermented hot sauces and condiments. Selling direct at local farmers markets and fairs as well as directly online.

  • As the owner of The Sauce Forge, I craft and sell fermented hot sauces and condiments using carefully sourced and homegrown ingredients.
  • I designed, engineered, and manage our e-commerce website, handling payments and orders, and created all branding and labels in compliance with food safety regulations.
  • I develop recipes, source materials, grow produce, and sell directly to customers online and at local markets, fostering strong community connections.

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July 2022 - Present (3 years 2 months)

loveholidays

Senior Software Engineer

Rust
TypeScript
GraphQL
Performance

Senior Software Engineer at loveholidays, playing a pivotal role in building loveholidays' cutting edge Search Platform, allowing customers to surface 1 trillion offers in seconds.

  • Increased booking conversion by 3% shown via our AB testing analytics, by being a main contributor in building out loveholidays' new checkout platform between Q3 2022 to Q2 2023.
  • Co-led a significant refactor of the checkout platform, eliminating data over-fetching, facilitating a 100% rollout of the new platform to customers.
  • Architected and built out loveholidays' review collection platform, that in time will improve loveholidays' SEO rankings and provide social proof for customers to make informed decisions regarding their purchases.
  • Led in devising strategies to facilitate fraud detection and prevention, resulting in blocking fraudulent payments totalling upwards of £200,000 within the first 2 weeks of the security fixes release.
  • Demonstrated leadership by leading hackathon projects, such as a distributed async 3D bookings visualization app that is now displayed in the office lobby, and contributed to mentoring, team management, and candidate interviews. Recognized as the team's expert in React, Rust, and software engineering best practices.

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January 2022 - July 2022 (6 months)

Freetrade

Software Engineer

TypeScript
Serverless
Mobile Development

Joined Freetrade as a Software Engineer working to grow Freetrade's user base beyond 1 million users and drive subscriptions.

  • Initially in the Pensions team, Proposed and implemented growth hacks, leading to a 15% surge in SIPP and ISA signups in Q1 2022.
  • Transitioned to the Subscriptions team, significantly contributing to the development of Freetrade's Standard subscription plan and upfront invoicing strategy.
  • Assumed responsibility for subscription integration level test suites, implementing over 300 tests to ensure the reliability of the Standard to Plus plan upgrade process.

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July 2021 - December 2021 (5 months)

Schlumberger

Software Engineer: GAIA OSDU

Full stack
Domain Driven Design
Java
Angular

Full-stack engineer technically leading a multi-disciplinary team with members from Houston, Mexico, and Pune.

  • Technically led the development of a streamlined seismic data marketplace using TypeScript, Angular, and Java Spring Boot. Building out a number of proofs of concepts and mentoring junior engineers.
  • Liaised with external map generation teams to define and agree upon a set of SLOs that both teams would work towards achieving.

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November 2020 - July 2021 (8 months)

Schlumberger

Software Engineer: GAIA Core

Leadership
High Visibility
Visualisation
SCRUM

Full-stack engineer contributing to a next-gen cloud-based Oil and Gas data marketplace.

  • Led a team of 7 engineers, Running daily stand-ups, pair programming sessions, 1-to-1s and reporting progress to stakeholders at a weekly scrum of scrums.
  • Successfully integrated multiple third-party APIs and platforms within an established project, while building out the marketplace and underpinning infrastructure.
  • Emerged as an expert within a complex project, enabling adaptation to changing requirements and a focus on product testability and quality.

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January 2019 - November 2020 (1 year 10 months)

Schlumberger

Software Engineer: Zenith

Seismic Processing
Cloud Infrastructure
Integration

Full-stack engineer working in a cloud infrastructure team. Using a polyglot tech stack: GCP, Kubernetes, Docker, C++, Golang, TypeScript, and Python

  • Owned the design, implementation and deployment of a seismic data processing pipeline written in Golang and leveraging Google PubSub, that enabled enriched seismic data generated in next generation simulations to be consumed by legacy seismic interpretation platforms.
  • Enabled GPU powered seismic interpretation machine learning on bare metal VMs in Google Compute Engine, slashing training and interpretation times of seismic data down by 50%.

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September 2014 - January 2019 (4 years 4 months)

Schlumberger

Software Engineer / Geoscientist

Simulation
Client Facing
Geoscience

Graduate engineer contributing to building a cloud-native training simulator called OilSim for the Oil and Gas industry. Successfully delivered a scalable micro-frontend-based dashboard accommodating up to 400+ OilSim users. Utilized JavaScript, PHP, RequireJS, Composer, Grunt, and MariaDB to create a fully configurable management tool for OilSim simulations, catering to diverse user needs.

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July 2012 - September 2013 (1 year 2 months)

Schlumberger

Intern Software Engineer

Prototyping
Model Integration
Public Speaking

A 14-month internship, primarily responsible for the development of a simulation and software integration test platform designed to validate prototype research algorithms, physics models, and commercial Schlumberger products.

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May 2011 - January 2012 (8 months)

FOLEY PATTERNS LIMITED

Automotive Modelmaker

Prototyping
Manufacturing
Temp

Designed and manufactured fibreglass models and tools for bespoke prototype car bodies, primarily for Morgan Motors.

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September 2010 - May 2014 (3 years 8 months)

The Nottingham Trent University

Bachelors Of Science

First Class With Honours
Computer Science

BSc (Hons) Computer Science BCS accredited course, I achieved the second highest grade of my cohort in my final year, graduating with a First with Honours

To complete my final year at Nottingham Trent University, I researched and developed an application capable of the generation and deployment of semi-autonomous supervisory controllers for general process automation. Upon completion I returned to Schlumberger Gould Research where I demonstrated my projects capabilities, driving a physical miniature drilling rig using a supervisory controller generated by my project, running against the drilling simulation platform I originally worked on during my internship.

July 2007 - May 2009 (1 year 9 months)

The King Edwards VI College

A-Level

Computing, Geography, and Art

Studied a range of A-Level subjects gaining access to study at university