I'm Owen Rees-Hayward

Data Engineer | ML Engineer | Software Developer | Software Architect | Experimentalist

Husband and father, coffee addict.

Hello, My Name is Owen.

I design and build great software and systems, and help drive forward the processes, practices and teams that are used in their creation. I'm currently based in Bristol, UK.

I'm an extremely versatile software/data engineer with broad experience from building small greenfield projects right through to defining Enterprise Architecture. I have a proven track record of timely technology adoption and am an outstanding analytical thinker and decision maker.

Just a flavour of my experience: Hadoop, Spark, Storm, Kafka, Heavy.ai (formerly MapD), billion-scale similarity search over dense vectors and data engineering on AWS and Google Cloud.

I like to read and stay up-to-date on the technology landscape and developing trends.

Sometimes I like to experiment with startups, side-projects and the occasional career change.

Oh, and I created spark-fires to help educate developers about Spark performance troubleshooting.

Contact Details

  • Owen Rees-Hayward
  • owenrh@googlemail.com

My Strengths

Yeah, I'm definitely good for something!

99%
Analysis
95%
Design & Architecture
95%
Technical Leadership
80%
Communication
40%
Early Starts

My Resume

Full info available on demand/LinkedIn.

Recent Roles

2022

Data Engineer - HSBC

Tech Lead and Spark Subject Matter Expert helping to build out a financial risk Data Lake on Google Cloud and push forward Spark and Data Engineering best-practice within the wider engineering group.


  • Working across multiple teams providing Spark troubleshooting, performance tuning, cluster contention and capacity planning support.
  • Lead on the development of a reusable inner-source ETL framework.

2019

Data Engineer - Ripjar

Having fun on the cutting-edge with billion-scale Knowledge Graphs and Spark NLP pipelines.

2018

Lead Data Engineer - Lloyds Banking Group

Building a state-of-the-art Spark streaming data pipeline, with data ingest and advanced analytics into HBase/Phoenix, and the development team around it.

Other tech in the pipeline includes: Kafka, Ignite and Elasticsearch.

2016

Data Engineer - cameraforensics.com

Full-stack data engineering role on the cameraforensics.com platform.

Responsible for billion/petabyte-scale:

  • image web crawling
  • image analytics pipelines
  • realtime image similarity search with state-of-the-art performance

Elasticsearch, Storm, Kafka, MapD, Ansible, AWS.

2016

Data Engineer - Ripjar

Full-stack data engineering role on a state-of-the-art advanced analytics and Machine Learning platform.

2015

Big Data Engineer - Consultancy (under NDA)

Three day technical spike for a Big Data Consultancy under NDA: included a report evaluating the production readiness of a framework and some example code.

2015

The Role That Never Happened - UK Government

Technical Advisor/Thought Leader role that never quite came through due to long paperwork saga.

2014

Freelance 3D and Motion Graphics Artist - O4D

3D career change experiment. You can read about my journey here o4d.co.uk/blog.

2013

Solutions Architect & Fixer - Friends Life UK

Had outstanding success stabilising one of the main customer facing platforms which had been experiencing significant issues.

2013

Startup Founder - datamooch.com

My second foray into the world of lean startups: created a realtime survey and data science web platform using Meteor.

Ultimately it was an unsuccessful minimum viable product, but it was another great learning experience.

2013

Solutions Architect - UK Government

Responsible for aligning all technical decisions of the business unit with business goals, and liaising with relevant parties.

Additional responsibilities included:

  • Support of a cross-organisation prototyping exercise to evaluate a new web application architecture.
  • Called in to provide an objective technical review of a large multi-million pound project.

2011 - 2013

Prototype Developer & Application Architect - UK Government

Initially lead on two-man team developing a highly successful GWT-based prototype web application, including complex back-end services.

Subsequently, acted as Technical Lead and Application Architect as the project went into full production ramping up to a ~ 20 person team. The project was very high profile and an outstanding success.

Additionally, also acted as UX liaison with an external Creative Design team.

Certifications

2022

Certified Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer

2017

Structuring Machine Learning Projects

2015

Spark Certified Developer

O’Reilly Media, Developer Certification for Apache Spark

2015

Scalable Machine Learning

2013

MongoDB for DBAs

MongoDB, License M102

Contact Me

Have a project you'd like to discuss?

Say
Hello

Owen Rees-Hayward

owenrh@googlemail.com