Sam Phillips's Email Addresses & Phone Numbers

I'm a passionate and bright technology leader with a deep engineering background, customer focus and commercial drive. Over the last decade I've worked with companies and startups of all sizes across e-commerce, online travel, SaaS products and logistics/warehousing. I've been part of two successful acquisitions and am proud to have built strong teams that deliver value, retain...

I'm a passionate and bright technology leader with a deep engineering background, customer focus and commercial drive. Over the last decade I've worked with companies and startups of all sizes across e-commerce, online travel, SaaS products and logistics/warehousing. I've been part of two successful acquisitions and am proud to have built strong teams that deliver value, retain top talent and learn quickly. My current team at eBay deploys 100 times per week and we recently released our first iOS app, engineered by a small team with no experience in iOS from scratch in 2 months. In the last few years I've spent more time mentoring and advising startups on their technology strategy, agile processes and hiring decisions, both informally and formally as part of programmes like Seedcamp. This has been really fulfilling and I'm keen to do more. I'm also a frequent coach and host at Codebar, an initiative focused on bringing more diversity into technology which we also sponsor. I believe that every project, challenge and decision can be made easier and more enjoyable for everyone involved, and there is always a win-win solution, if you look hard enough. I’m happiest when I’m learning. Specialities: Leadership, Team Mentoring and Coaching, Hiring, Performance Management, Budget Management, Agile, Lean, XP, Kanban, Scrum, Devops, Product Management, Project Management, Technical Sales and Pre-Sales, Systems Integration, Business Analysis, Outsourcing. Startups, E-commerce, Omni-channel, Operations, Logistics, Supply Chain, Catalogue, Online Travel. Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, Amazon Web Services, BDD, TDD, Chef, Cucumber, OSS, SQL, Linux, Technical Architecture, Object-Orientated Design, Service-Orientated Architecture, Microservices, Continuous Deployment, Message-Based Architecture.Head of Engineering, Shutl (an eBay Company) @ Joined eBay as part of 2013 acquisition of Shutl. Part of the Shutl Senior Management Team, working with teams across eBay and across the globe in the US, Europe and China. Leading a group of 16 engineers, designers, analysts and managers who compose 2-3 mature, agile product teams. Drive and manage innovation in our platform, collaborate on defining strategy and delivering quickly. The engineering team deploys 100 times a week and embodies a devops mentality, with all team members actively engaged in building, maintaining and monitoring our infrastructure and supporting our customers. Migrated to a microservices architecture with a focus on quality, refactoring and behaviour-driven development. Tripled the team over 2 years with pro-active recruitment, talent development and performance management. Actively worked to increase our cultural, ethnic and gender diversity and our standing in the technical community. Project highlights include our integration into eBay core, our first native mobile app and a major data science operational research project to reduce unit costs and realise efficiencies in aggregation and workforce optimisation in our deliveries. Worked with functional integration teams from IT, HR, Talent and Facilities to make Shutl into an eBay company. Selected for eBay's Emerging Leaders Program and using my first time at a big company to learn about leadership, delivering at scale, strategic execution, and collaborating across boundaries and borders. Winner of 2014 "eBay Hero" award for people management and talent development. From December 2013 to Present (1 year 11 months) London, United KingdomHead of Engineering @ Responsible for delivery and architecture of all engineering projects across multiple teams, and line management of the engineering group - software engineers, front-end engineers and devops engineers. Managed the build of Shutl’s US technology base to completion, including our integration as delivery partner for eBay Now, with launches in New York, Chicago, Dallas, Boston and San Francisco. Fostered a top-flight engineering culture with a relentless focus on quality, pair programming as the norm and doubled the size of the team. Venture backed, Shutl was acquired by eBay in November 2013. I was part of the team that worked on the engineering, retail, systems, facilities and IT due diligence. From April 2013 to December 2013 (9 months) London, United KingdomHead of DevOps @ Created the Devops team at Shutl, transforming a reactive systems group into a pro-active team that is focused on business value, pragmatic with risk and aligned absolutely to the product development roadmap and engineering efforts. Introduced agile practices and test-driven development, and lead the successful completion and rollout of V2 of the Shutl platform. From November 2012 to April 2013 (6 months) London, United KingdomHead of Delivery @ Building and leading world-class delivery practices at Evently, an early-stage SaaS startup in the event space. Helped create and run a high-performance team focusing on customer value and flow, and spending my time coding, scoping, agile-ing and working with internal stakeholders. From November 2011 to November 2012 (1 year 1 month) London, United KingdomAgile Project Manager @ Agile evangelist, running multiple teams across different business areas such as finance, content, customer services and business intelligence - but my special focus was on operations, logistics and warehousing. * Ran multiple teams of developers, testers and data analysts using lightweight, Agile techniques (Scrum, Kanban, XP) * Grew performance through recruitment, mentoring, cross-training and coaching * Delivered strongly architected, enduring projects within a fast-paced environment Projects included PayPal integration, expanding our courier decision logic and adding delivery options, and integration of a new warehouse management system (WMS) in warehouses in the UK, the channel islands and the US. The Hut Group is a multi-vertical e-commerce retailer. It is the largest sports nutrition supplier in Europe, as well as the largest heath and beauty retailer and a top-three entertainments retailer in the UK. Through organic growth and strategic acquisitions, it saw sales grow by 70% in 2011 to £143m. From September 2010 to November 2011 (1 year 3 months) Technical Director @ Lead multiple technical teams at this medium-sized web software agency, working with internal and external stakeholders to drive value and to delight customers. Our biggest success was On The Beach Holidays (www.onthebeach.co.uk), an early mover in the online travel space. I was developer #1 for this project and its lead developer for several years. Investment in 2007 valued the business at £40m, and further investment in 2013 valued at £73m. On The Beach is still one of the UK's largest and most successful Ruby startups with turnover in 2014 of £400m. As part of the team that rebranded the company from Webmaint, I lead the agency's move from Perl to Ruby over this period, and introduced BDD/TDD, Agile (Scrum, Kanban, XP), continuous integration and continuous deployment. I quickly grew the ruby team, apace with business development and with 100% retention. From June 2008 to August 2010 (2 years 3 months) Manchester, United KingdomWeb Development Manager @ Promoted to leadership role - running a team of 5 software developers on client projects. From June 2007 to June 2008 (1 year 1 month) Web Applications Developer @ Web development in Perl and JavaScript at a small web agency. From July 2005 to June 2007 (2 years) MA, Modern European History @ The University of Manchester From 2004 to 2005 BA(Hons), History @ The University of Manchester From 2001 to 2004 'A' Levels, History, Latin, English Literature, General Studies @ Bishop Vesey's Grammar School From 1994 to 2001 Sam Phillips is skilled in: Ruby, Agile, Agile Project Management, Technical Architecture, Ruby on Rails, Kanban, Scrum, Team Leadership, BDD, TDD, User Stories, Online Travel, Supply Chain, Logistics, PCI DSS, JavaScript, MySQL, SQL, Agile Methodologies, Internal Communications, E-commerce, Business Analysis, Test Driven Development, Web Development, Software Development, Web Applications, CSS, HTML 5, jQuery, Apache, Git, Start-ups, Linux, SaaS, Project Management, JSON