CMC Markets

Head of Development – CMC Markets – May 2007 – August 2011

I worked in Digitallook, a part of the CMC Markets group. Digitallook is a provider of website portals for clients including HSBC, Barclays, Santander, Charles Stanley and the BBC. During my final year at CMC, having climbed the career ladder from a Senior developer to Head of Development, I was responsible for the following:

  • Maintainance and enhancements to large legacy codebase, running on over 30 webservers and serving over 5M page impressions per month.
  • Maintainance of realtime pricing systems, handling millions of messages a day from exchanges across the world.
  • Managing 10 developers(at peak), giving regular reviews and introducing some Agile methodology.
  • Client Liason – regular meetings with clients such as Barclays and Santander to discuss ongoing requirements and enhancements to our platform.
  • Incident management and reporting – giving clear, concise and regular updates and reports to our clients when systems were having issues.
  • Code quality and release management – making sure that all code released has been tested sufficiently and that releases are done in a way that will not affect clients. This included personally diffing the code before releases.
  • Providing end-of-line support – getting my hands ‘dirty’ where necessary and suggesting ways in which to solve the more difficult problems we came up against.
  • Systems design and architecture – ensuring any new solution will not break existing architecture and is efficient. When our data centres moved, ensuring that we would have sufficient hardware to re-implement our existing service.

Below are some screenshots of some of the solutions that I had active participation in:


BBC Charting and data service
Charting provided using Varnish caching technology, XML feeds provided for the rest of the data on these pages(BBC Market data).


Halifax online corporate solution
Complete drop-in portal for market data provided to Halifax.


Digitallook.com Website
Website for private investors with a vast array of analytical tools(Digitallook.com).