Edward D'Amato CV

Summary

Currently working as a Senior Software Engineer at Pleo as part of the AI Enablement team, exploring how GenAI and LLMs can be used within Pleo whilst also enabling other teams to leverage such tech.
Experienced Software Engineer with a demonstrated history of working in the internet industry. Huge fan of clean code, close collaboration and automation. Avid practitioner of test-driven development and functional programming techniques.

Work Experience

Industry

  1. 2022 - present

    Senior Software Engineer • Pleo

    As part of the AI Enablement team:

    1. Built an internal version of ChatGPT for Pleo, including features such as anonymisation, leveraging of internal product knowledge and document upload. Main contributor to the frontend as well as major contributions to the Python and Kotlin backends.
    2. Led and implemented Vendor Context project: a project that generates context about Pleo vendors using LLMs including using an evaluation matrix (also via LLMs) to evaluate generated content against a specific criteria.
    3. Worked on various experiments and prototypes including generation of spend policies for Pleo customers as well as expense categorisation using voice recognition.
    As part of the Content Localisation team:
    1. Building together with another engineer in the team the localisation infrastructure (automations, processes) for Pleo across 10 different markets, across a set of products including web based apps, native mobile apps and communications.
    2. Built an automated, resilient and queue-based end-to-end localisation workflow for customer communications at Pleo, enabling communication owners to request translations for communications via a click of a button within the CMS, with automated translations uploads back into the CMS once translations are ready.
    3. Set up an event log pipeline for automated localisation processes/workflows, enabling the team to store events as they happen using Kafka/BigQuery; allowing the team to query such events to gather insights and metrics.

  2. 2018 - 2022

    Senior Software Engineer • Bulb

    1. Built from the ground up Bulb's communications platform in a team of two (three since Feb 2021). Supporting mission critical comms such as monthly billing and welcome packs across 4 markets.
    2. Worked with business stakeholders and consuming teams on a product and technical roadmap for the platform, delivering key functionality such as multi channel support (e.g. SMS, Push Notifications) and template rendering.
    3. Built a resilient and fault tolerant platform based on queues and events whilst leveraging cloud scaling strategies, delivering over 24m comms since 2019.
    4. Delivered an automated API load testing suite using k6 and DataDog running on a replicable Kubernetes workload, helping to measure any performance regressions before major releases.
    5. One of the main organisers of Bulb's first ever (and so far only) hackaton, with great success getting involvement from all guilds within the company.

  3. 2016 - 2018

    Agile Software Engineer • eBay

    1. Delivered a reusable, scalable, WAI-ARIA compliant library in vanilla JavaScript for eBay web applications, which provides user onboarding tours for any eBay user.
    2. Delivered an isomorphic, fully responsive, WAI-ARIA compliant web application for eBay sellers to collect VAT information using NodeJS, TypeScript and Marko (an alternative JavaScript framework to React).
    3. Contributed to the delivery of a new REST API responsible for providing a seller's VAT information. Currently taking around ~600 M hits a day.
    4. Part of an agile team practicing pair programming, iterative development, XP, TDD and continuous integration and delivery.

  4. 2015 - 2016

    UI Developer • Harrods

    1. Transformed creative designs into pixel perfect, fully responsive, adaptive and device agnostic user interfaces. Embraced progressive enhancement and graceful degradation strategies when building UIs.
    2. Delivered BORDERFREE; supporting multi-currency payments. Responsible for building key areas; such as country/currency selector features as well as checkout UI enhancements.
    3. Heavily contributed to the delivery of the new Harrods.com, creating UI components from scratch for core areas such as product pages, product galleries, megamenu, quick shop and mini cart.
    4. Heavily contributed to the creation of a custom grid system, catering for 5 different screen sizes.

  5. 2010 - 2015

    Web Projects Team Lead / Senior .NET Web Developer • ICON

    Delivered numerous projects across different industries as a full stack developer, often building web projects from the ground up, using ASP.NET, SQL Server and JavaScript amongst other technologies. Highlighted projects include:

    1. Delivered a real-time web-based solution as part of electricvehiclesmalta.eu, showing 90 geo-located eletric charging stations offering booking facilities.
    2. Delivered Laferla.com.mtas the lead developer, creating a wizard-like flow to purchase insurance online, delivering dynamic quotes and discounts.
    3. Heavily contributed as the lead developer to the delivery of ePortfolio, building core features from the ground up across the whole stack.
    4. Heavily contributed to the creation of ICON's in-house CMS (called SNAP), building core features from the ground up across the whole stack such as an interactive and dynamic Page Console.

  6. 2005 - 2009

    Software Developer • Transactium

    Delivered payment gateway projects such as a hosted payments solution and tools (as web applications) for merchants and acquirers (banks).

Community

  1. Jan 2018

    JavaScript coach • Codebar.io Workshop

    Coached fellow developers at a codebar hosted at eBay's offices in London.

  2. Sep 2017

    Innovation project • eBay EXPO 2017

    Participated in eBay's EXPO 2017 in San Jose where teams from across the different eBay regions come together and present concepts, ideas and prototypes. My project was chosen as one of the winners from all the other entries across teams in London and Berlin.

  3. Dec 2013

    Hackathon for charity • Tech Spark / Microsoft Hackathon

    Participated in a hackathon organised by Tech Spark, a tech community in Malta in collbaration with Microsoft. Part of a three-strong team that built a Windows 8 application called 'Storyteller', integrated with Facebook's API.

Education

  1. 2013–2014

    B.Sc. in Computer Science (1st class)

    University of Hertfordshire

    Thesis:Potato Catcher: Involved building a mobile game based on the Android platform using JAVA. The game revolves around the idea of 'hot potato', whereby a group of people positioned in a circle pass around an object with a countdown. When the countdown expires, the person holding the object loses. The game works with each person having their own smartphone, each connected to the same game session. With the use of gestures, a user can pass the 'object' to another person in the session., Advisor: Dr. Guy Saward

  2. 2010 - 2012

    Diploma in Computing & Information Systems

    University of London

  3. 2003–2005

    MCAST-BTEC National Diploma in Computing (Software Development)

    MCAST Malta

Skills

Technical

Vast understanding of, and experience working with technologies, including:

  • TypeScript, JavaScript (ECMAScript), DOM & related APIs
  • Python & Kotlin
  • Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud & Kubernetes
  • Docker & Dockerised applications
  • Event and queue based architectures (using tools such as Redis, Google Cloud Pub/Sub, AWS SQS, Kafka)
  • IaaS, mainly using Terraform and tooling like Env0
  • Node.js
  • CSS, CSS3, CSS preprocessors (SASS, LESS), Styled Components, Tailwind
  • HTML5 and related APIs
  • Various frameworks; including React, NextJS, MarkoJS, Angular, JQuery
  • Single page applications and state management; including Redux
  • WAI-ARIA compliance (accessibility)
  • Bundling and minification (Webpack, Lasso)
  • Code transpilers (Babel, TypeScript)
  • RESTful & GraphQL APIs (design, implementation, documentation), Swagger, JSDoc, Versioning
  • Relational databases primarily Postgres, MSSQL, MySQL
  • Experience with numerous other libraries, tools and frameworks related to the above including pnpm, npm, Yarn, Ramda.js, Jest, Mocha, Cypress, Chai, sinon, Nightwatch.js, eslint/tslint, Grunt/Gulp, prettier, nock, axios, Selenium, date-fns, momentjs and many more.

Throughout the years, I have also worked with a wide range of programming languages and technologies, including C#/ASP.NET, Microsoft Azure, Oracle, Mongo, Java and Scala.

Practices and Methodologies

  • Monitoring & alerting using tools such as DataDog, PagerDuty, Google Stackdriver, Sentry
  • Technical design documents and ADRs
  • Test-driven development
  • Testing, testing strategies (unit, integration, end to end, regression, exploratory), test automation
  • Continuous integration and delivery (automation, build pipelines)
  • Build pipelines; most recently using CircleCI & GitHub Workflows; experience with using Jenkins, Gitlab, TravisCI, Vercel
  • Continous code quality inspection and static code analysis (mostly using Sonarqube and ShiftLeft)
  • Coding katas
  • Trunk based and feature-branch based development
  • Agile (Scrum, Kanban, XP) and respective ceremonies (daily stand-up, retrospective, planning and refinement sessions)
  • Security (OWASP Top 10)
  • Measuring impact through data

Awards

  1. 2015

    Best eGovernment Initiative (electricvehiclesmalta.eu - ICON)

    MCA eBusiness Awards 2015

  2. 2014

    Most Innovative Solution (Laferla Insurance - ICON)

    MCA eBusiness Awards 2014

Languages

  • Maltese: Native
  • English: Native
  • Italian: Fluent

Professional interests

Simplicity, functional programming, open source, giving back to the community through coding

Personal interests

Animals, environment, sustainability and renewables, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, football, DIY.