Toby Fleming

Masters of Physics (MPhys) at University of Leeds

Bachelor of Physics (BSc Hons.) at University of Leeds

Senior Systems Development Engineer at NVIDIA

Currently, I am a Senior Systems Development Engineer working on high-performance, distributed storage backends and web services for NVIDIA Omniverse. (Rust, C, Distributed Systems, High Performance, Linux)

Member of Technical Staff at Qumulo

At Qumulo, I worked on the read/write layer of a network file and resource sharing protocol implementation for our high-performance, distributed file system. It is capable of handling gigabytes of throughput a second with minimal overhead, and has hundreds of tests and automated performance regression tests. (Rust, C, Distributed Systems, High Performance, Linux)

I designed an access control (ACL) feature for the network file protocol implementation. The design handled both POSIX- and Windows-style ACLs for predictable, interoperable support without surprising edge-cases that might lead to security issues.

After this, I was engaged in cloud and security work. In my first month in this the role, I designed a new feature around REST API access for on-premise and cloud environments, with access control, and audits/repudiation in mind. I also review and hardened existing features. (Information Security, AppSec, AWS, Azure)

As Qumulo is a rapidly growing company, I lead the development of interview screening questions that reflect the day-to-day work at Qumulo. They can be evaluated in 15 minutes or less by an engineer, as opposed to the hour-long commitment for in-person screening. They can also be evaluated blindly, and have a predefined set of evaluation criteria to reduce bias. From data of our 2020 college hiring season, it proved to be more predictive whether a candidate would pass further interview rounds and be made an offer than other questions. (Hiring, Growing Teams)

Software Development Engineer II at Amazon Web Services (AWS)

On the AWS CloudFormation team, I delivered the drift detection feature as the tech lead, with support for over 50 resources. This included a private beta and global, multi-region roll-out with in-depth metrics and monitoring. (Java, Distributed Systems, Scalability, Monitoring)

I was involved with the CloudFormation registry for custom extensions from the start. I lead the development of the open-source framework to develop these extensions in multiple languages. As of mid-August 2019, I authored over 150 code reviews and reviewed over 500. I also designed, set up and maintained the continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines for the framework itself, as well as for the extensions. Over 40 extensions were running a reliable CI/CD system. (Python, Git, GitHub, Open Source, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, DevOps)

I also helped design the CloudFormation registry back-end, and ensured the service could serve on the order of magnitude of 10,000 requests per second i.e. over 10k/s in multiple regions (AWS currently has 22 regions). (Java, NoSQL, DynamoDB, High Availability, Distributed Systems, Scalability, Load Testing)

I set up and maintain the Continuous Integration pipelines for around 10 internal projects. The CI includes auto-formatting enforcement, static analysers for code quality and security issues, comprehensive test suits with 100% code coverage, and integration/black-box testing. (Python, DevOps, Continuous Integration)

Outside of the CloudFormation team, I wrote and maintain internal Python build tooling used by over 450 consumers. I've also developed and deployed mitigations/fixes for security issues. (Information Security, Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures, CVE)

Software Engineer at Kogan.com

My stay in Australia was on a temporary visa. At Kogan, I developed serverless workflows for next-day delivery in the Melbourne metropolitan area, and improvements to product recommendation algorithms. (Elasticsearch, AWS, AWS Lambda, Serverless, Data Mining)

I delivered improvements to the store front-end and back-end systems. I integrated Visa Checkout functionality on the Australian and New Zealand sites. (Python, Django, HTML, Full Stack, Javascript, React, Postgres, PostgreSQL, eCommerce, Payment Processing)

I also improved the speed and reliability of containerised continuous integration workflows. Before, one in five runs had to be restarted. I hardened and parallelised the tests, so that runs only took as long as the longest test suite and the flakiness dropped to one run in 25. I also put Jenkins Blue Ocean in place, a - at the time - new UI that gives better feedback on which test suite failed. (Docker, Jenkins, Continuous Integration)

Scrum Master & Software Engineer at IBM United Kingdom Ltd

I was the scrum master for the global IBM FlashSystem V9000 development team. (agile, scrum, Jira, Confluence, Kanban)

As the software architect for IBM Spectrum Scale deployment team, I supported the development of an install toolkit that provided a setup wizard and a fully auditable, automated cluster installation. I also helped design and set-up our continuous integration pipeline. (Python, Chef, Vagrant, Jenkins, Gerrit, Linux/Unix, GPFS, Openstack)

I led the development of IP quorum on IBM Storwize products. If the connection between two sites is lost, this feature allows the cluster to continue running. Instead of a third site appliance, a simple application can be deployed without costly fibre-channel connectivity between all sites. (C, Java, Linux/Unix)

For the initial release of IBM FlashSystem V9000 I owned and shipped the first-time data capture and disaster recovery features. (Perl, C)

As part of the Manchester Lab DevOps team, I ran our DNS & DHCP infrastructure until mid-2015. (Linux/Unix, DevOps, sysadmin, Ansible)

Software Engineer at Work AnyWare Ltd

To augment our leading cloud intellectual property document storage service I created a Microsoft Office plugin, which automatically versions and uploads documents when the user saves. Users can also open any version directly without switching to the web interface. I also wrote the server side API. (C#, PHP)

Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow (SURF) at California Institute of Technology

As part of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, I designed and wrote a web application for collaborative electromagnetic follow-up of gravitational wave candidates. The (Python, NumPy, C, HTML5, Javascript, Data Visualization, Interactive Projection)

Junior Software Engineer at Ostertag Solutions AG

I ported our attendant console product from legacy Visual Basic to C#. I designed and coded the UI for a 24" touch-screen VoIP/SIP telephone that was presented at the 2009 CeBIT conference. I also deployed servers and hardware on-site for customers. (Visual Basic, C#, .NET, Linux/Unix)