Simon Lawrence

Sole Lead Engineer for a 12-developer team, combining hands-on engineering, architecture and technical leadership.

• RapidApps. Created and led RapidApps, now the standard foundation for new projects across the team and used by around eight applications. It abstracts common application complexity including authentication, permissions, branding, CQRS, logging, database patterns, state management and CI/CD, allowing developers to move from project setup to business functionality from day one.
• AI-first application development. Pioneering AI-first application development by evolving RapidApps around AI-assisted engineering, using strong conventions and abstracted infrastructure so developers and coding agents can concentrate on business behaviour rather than repeatedly solving application plumbing.
• Architecture and technical direction. Lead architecture and technical decision-making across the team's applications, providing direction and review on significant engineering choices while remaining actively involved in development and prototyping.
• Complex application delivery. Led delivery of complex business applications, including a Flexible Benefits System and multiple Question/Answer platforms, taking projects from technical design through implementation and resolving difficult engineering problems along the way.
• AI strategy and adoption. Help shape RSM's adoption of AI through the firm's AI Strategy group, supporting developers adopting tools such as GitHub Copilot and actively exploring how AI changes software development rather than simply adding it to existing workflows.
• Modern engineering practices. Drive modern engineering practices, with long-standing advocacy for Docker, containerised development and consistent application architecture. More recently, advocate for greater use of GitHub where its AI-assisted development and review capabilities provide advantages over existing Azure DevOps workflows.
• Quality within delivery. Successfully advocated for testers to work directly within development streams rather than as a separate downstream function, bringing development and testing closer together.
• Developer growth. Develop the engineering team by mentoring developers, running dedicated technical learning sessions and helping colleagues adopt new technologies and AI-assisted development practices.
• Team leadership. Support the wider leadership of the team, working with my manager on performance appraisals, developer progression and team development while remaining primarily focused on engineering and innovation.
• Improvement beyond software projects. Successfully proposed an ideation portal to make it easier for colleagues to surface and develop new ideas across the firm.

Full-stack developer who increasingly influenced the technologies and development approaches adopted by the wider team.

• Application development. Built and maintained business applications across the Microsoft and web development stack, taking increasing responsibility for application design and difficult technical problems.
• Single-page applications. Championed the team's early move from traditional MVC applications towards single-page applications, helping deliver one of its first SPAs. SPA-based architectures subsequently became the standard approach across the team's applications.
• New technologies and patterns. Regularly introduced new technologies and development patterns, evaluating approaches beyond the existing stack and helping the team adopt those that improved how applications were built.
• Growing technical responsibility. Progressively took on greater technical responsibility, laying the foundations for promotion into the team's Lead Engineer role.

Built a strong full-stack foundation and the technical breadth that led to promotion to Senior Developer.

• Career foundations. Joined RSM as a graduate developer and progressed through increasingly senior development roles, building a strong full-stack foundation and developing the technical breadth that led to promotion to Senior Developer.

Three years in games testing before moving into software engineering, providing an early grounding in quality assurance, systematic problem solving and attention to detail.