Mark AustinSenior Software Engineer

Joined as Backend Engineer and promoted to Senior Backend Engineer in July 2024. Regularly act as technical lead for the Analytics & Reporting team, a distributed team of 9, driving technical planning and delivery.

• Tech lead for the Apple Insights integration. Made the case for a separate service over the monolith, took it to production in 2024, and led its 2026 move to Apple's Business API v1 with no rollback. It now processes nearly 3 million requests a day.
• Own metric deprecations, API migrations and the working relationship with Apple's API team.
• Own R&D for new product work, taking ambiguous briefs through technical investigation, requirements and executable plans across backend, frontend and QA.
• Owned the response when Meta removed 10 metrics we ingested: R&D, product decisions and a 9-ticket plan, all shipped ahead of Meta's deadline.
• As the only UK-based engineer on a team spanning the Americas and Dubai, provide early-day coverage for client-facing and system-critical issues, working with Customer Success to give clients clear answers.
• Built Uberdocs, a Claude-powered internal assistant used across the business that has answered over 1,000 questions.
• Run the team's ceremonies, wrote its Definition of Ready and Definition of Done, and onboard new engineers.
• Interview backend candidates across system design, code review and live coding, and built an interview tracker that spreads interviews across the team and has supported several hires.

Founded and run Austin Tech Solutions in my spare time, building websites for businesses across Yorkshire and the North East and owning discovery, design, development, hosting and support. Built Yorkshire Motorsport, a production Next.js and TypeScript app that brings track days, test days and race meetings across 5 circuits into one calendar.

I joined AND Digital as an Associate Developer in January 2019 and was promoted to Product Developer in 2021 and Senior Product Developer in 2022. From 2020 to 2023 I was a senior engineer at Sky Betting & Gaming on its horse racing and greyhound betting engines, building services in Kotlin and Kafka. I owned key features across projects that integrated new data providers, cut data-processing latency with concurrent processing in Kotlin Flow, built load profiles for load testing, led production deployments and mentored junior and senior engineers. Before that I built a Java and Spring Boot proof of concept for KCOM, added Cypress end-to-end testing for N Brown, built the new e-commerce front end for MKM Building Supplies in React, and ran web development workshops for the charity Slung Low. I also coached junior developers as a Career Coach.

During my industrial placement year at university, I worked at Baker Hughes, a GE company, as an EID IT Intern. I built data visualisations to help optimise the performance and efficiency of machines in the pipeline factory, and contributed to a recruitment showcase web application used to represent the company's culture and career opportunities at events, all delivered using Agile and Scrum.

I graduated with a First Class BSc (Hons) in Computer Science, with an overall mark of 83%, the second highest in my cohort. My final-year project, Personalised Interactive IoT Experiences for Museums (82%), extended Quando, a toolset that lets museum curators build interactive exhibits without programming, adding visitor detection and personalisation using BBC micro:bits. I was also social secretary for the Sheffield Hallam Warriors American football team.