Steve Stagg

Contract lead developer

> £50m

Client savings by implementing best-in-class solution

Recognition

Recognition from UnaVista, Microsoft, FDA for various projects

Experience

Extensive experience across multiple industries & technologies

“Impossible”

Description of technical challenges that have been solved

About Me

I solve technical problems quickly, delivering high-quality solutions that balance cost, speed, technical rigour, and business needs.

I have a passion for understanding the true nature of a problem, identifying the most appropriate solution, and guiding its delivery to achieve both immediate success and long-term sustainability.

I'm equally comfortable defining strategy and architecture for large-scale enterprise initiatives, and working hands-on with individual requirements to deliver small targeted solutions.

Experience

AI Solutions - Mosaic Advanced Analytics, Pridepath 2019 - current

Developed iOS app fusing AR, IMU, GPS data plus Voice interaction, gesture detection, VLM analysis into a helper tool for people struggling with memory issues. Entirely on-device and real-time.
Sole developer implementing best-in-class PDF question answering solution, LLM question answering, robust anti-hallucination approach, distributed parallel processing, providing foolproof excerpt matching & on-page highlighting.
Built LLM-powered software project overview tool, automatic roadmaps, trend detection, traceability, progress reports, individual role-based tailored outputs. Static site, using highly structured/controlled Rust-based public LLM interface.
AI-powered architecture reviews of third-party systems, using LLMs for fast, accurate full-system analysis.
Developed state-of-the-art hybrid NLP processing platform using Rust core with PostgreSQL plugin and Python library to allow complex user-driven NLP querying over large corpora of text. spaCy & LLM based processing performed with AWS Batch, with analysis in Jupyter and SQL (Tableau/Power BI).
Designed and implemented a full-stack system for self-service machine learning anomaly detection, based on streaming datasets. Intuitive, guided interface designed to be used by expert, but non-technical, SMEs. Using SciPy, sklearn, pandas, Parquet, d3, and ag-grid. Proactively detected systemic issues in upstream systems risking significant financial impact.

Software Lead - Bank of America, YouView, Mosaic FM, BSkyB, others 2013 - 2019

Developed the system that transformed a Tier-1 investment bank's transaction reporting from being a significant regulatory risk, to being named most accurate high-volume transaction reporting firm by UnaVista in 2018. Since then, this system has saved millions of dollars by avoiding compliance penalties across many global jurisdictions.
Real-time regulatory post-trade & transaction reporting engine using Python and NumPy. Generating 10s of millions of daily reports from hundreds of millions of events, joining multiple external datasets and running thousands of rules. Average report published in 80ms. One-click, auditable, per-field lineage documentation generated by automated static analysis of rules.
Wrote highly optimized Cython Avro serialization library & recursive Python JIT to enable use of Python at required throughputs.
Revolutionized problem analysis in the department by implementing a novel UI for visualizing trade lifecycles, exposing complex timing-based issues in an easy-to-discover interface.
Brought in to troubleshoot and performance tune problematic Objective-C iOS app. In two days was able to deliver a 5x performance gain in primary bottleneck. Delivered design plan for larger architecture improvements.

Tech Lead (Head of Backend) - onefinestay 2017

Successfully led complete rewrite of complex website backend, to integrate multiple companies' inventory and order management systems and support 3x inventory. Implemented using GraphQL and real-time feeds from external systems. Results: improved performance, reduction in operational issues & support. Project delivered successfully within two-month deadline.
Implemented novel Flask based GraphQL interface using runtime automatic schema generation using type hinting. Advanced PostgreSQL based pricing calculation removed need for slow, high-maintenance search indexes.
Managed a geographically distributed backend engineering team.

Software Engineer - Cmed Technology 2008 - 2012

Technical lead and engineer for an integration project that formed the nexus of a pivotal eSource trial that gained recognition from Microsoft, the FDA, SCDM, and the board of a top-tier Pharma company.
Tech lead & Architecture for Django based web UI frontend. Replacing existing flagship UI. Handling clinical trial data, from scratch. Produced Design & Functional specifications that passed MHRA audit.
Product Management for major project, providing mockups, design specs, and technical guidance to dev teams.

Web Development - Contract 2005 - 2008

Web & Desktop development, PHP, C and C++, Active Directory, Email & Security management.
Recorded, printed, typeset, synthesized, published, and nationally sold a school music book for local musician.

Technologies

I try not to focus too much on particular technologies. Other factors typically are more important than which language or library is chosen. However, my experiences tend to center around:

Python Cython, Django, Flask, SQLAlchemy, most libraries
Rust Fast data processing, typically integrating with PostgreSQL, or Python using PyO3 and pgrx
Swift since iOS 4, games and business apps
Go, Ruby, R Commercial experience
PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL query optimization, indexing, automated schema management
NoSQL Redis, AMPS, Memcached, Elasticsearch & Kibana
C, C++ ANSI C, C99, C++11, C++14, header-only libraries
polars, pandas, NumPy, Jupyter notebooks, Spark large-scale enterprise data processing
libfann, TensorFlow, PyTorch, llama.cpp, spaCy ... classic neural-network and back-propagation training
AWS, Docker, nginx, App Engine, Lambda Wide variety of CI, CD, and infrastructure tech