Robert Robinson
Staff Engineer
Education
Bachelor of Engineering (Mechatronic Space) / Bachelor of Science (Physics)
University of Sydney - 2018
Honours First Class
Interests
- Climbing
- Skiing
Career Profile
I’m a force multiplier, leveraging my time to guide technical roadmaps as well as mentor team members to promote their growth and realise their potential. While I initially focused on my individual contribution to software, my natural tendency to help people and optimise processes resulted in my role shifting quickly to prioritise these aspects which significantly increased my impact. My skill set enables me to execute on solving difficult and complex problems; starting out with initial research on the problem space, solution ideation, its implementation, the distribution process and then its subsequent iteration based on data driven decisions, enabled through effective monitoring. This impulse to help people has shifted my purpose in life to uplift those who are in poverty due to inequalities outside of their control. As someone who lives on this planet I also cannot stand by without applying my strengths to help fight climate change driven which I believe is driven by the same unsustainable actions and greed that promotes the worlds growing inequality.
Experiences
- My role was to provide guidance and support on all technical decisions. I acted as the link between the developers, head of engineering and founders to propose solutions for the long term efficiency of the business and obtain resource allocation to achieve these.
- Enabled the successful delivery and continued management of 4 client environments by building our platform configuration service. This required significant research into our security and data isolation strategies that were then presented to internal, client and regulatory stakeholders for approval.
- Drove a shift in product release frequency from quarterly to fortnightly while reducing the occurrence of release blockers. This was achieved by pioneering a cultural shift in our software delivery process and implementing tooling to enable it.
- Managed the security audit processes and executed the remediation of findings as well as handling client success for critical security flows including customer sign-up, login and account recovery through discussion with their Chief Information Security Officer.
- Enhanced the backend testing process by developing data injection tooling that supported unit, integration and end-to-end test functionality. Trend/outcome of bugs, was then leveraged for the development of user acceptance testing to automate regression testing with greater confidence.
- Heavily involved in security audit processes, managing and executing the remediation of findings as well as handling client success for critical security flows including customer sign-up, login and account recovery through discussion with their Chief Information Security Officer.
- Enabled the acquisition of 1000+ small business bank customers onto the platform by delivering a server-less backend for the onboarding pipeline that had to meet APRA and AUSTRAC compliance requirements.
- Promoted 3 times from specialist to manager.
- Lead product direction and backend development of a enterprise automation delivery platform redesign which has been deployed at 100+ clients. Focussed on addressing issues with end user complexity of the product in order to improve the scalability of the product delivery.
- Shifted product release cadence from quarterly to monthly by improving CI/CD and overall development processes to scale application delivery.
- Mentored and performance managed 10 developers, all receiving promotions at one point.
- Scoped, developed and lead an automation monitoring platform to provide direct feedback to clients on the return of investment from our asset suite. Pioneered a shift to an agile delivery process as part of this.
- Involved in client engagement and delivery of the same automation delivery platform to both internal and external client teams.
Projects
- Engaged with the Pollinate Group to develop a new customer sales management interface for the marginalised women they empower as entrepreneurs. Their impact space covers health, environmental and gender equality where they leverage microfinance and the gossip model to scale their reach and effectiveness.
- The project has 200 monthly active users, accounts for 36% of all stock requests and has improved process efficiency for distribution and support by 10x for their users.
- Worked directly with leadership and stakeholders to gather application requirements, iterate on designs, enable roll-out to users and presented usage analytics.
- Obtained AUD$80K funding from the Accenture Eco Innovation Challenge
- Built a dedicated mobile phone application catered for low literacy and low tech literacy users by leveraging clear imagery, large interactive components as well as provide text-to-voice across multiple languages for all components.
- To improve the application adoption we traveled to India to; Work in person training the outreach/distribution teams so that they could effectively support the entrepreneurs, Communicate directly with the entrepreneurs to gather user feedback as well as observe how they interact with the app to better understand behaviours, Train Pollinate’s technical team on support processes to promote self-sustainability as well as improve end user support experience.
Global Finalist out of 30k participants at the NASA SpaceApps Hackathon for our solution to identify remote/temporary communities from satellite images. This was achieved using a retrained MaskRCNN model for identification and utilizing the ELK stack for processed data storage and visualization. A major focus of our project effort was identifying key areas of value that could be delivered within the short time frame, providing an initially targeted solution to a general problem allowing for a much wider scope once actual value was identified.
My honours thesis, completed as my industry scholarship at Accenture, investigated the ability to improve robotic control systems through bio-mimicry. This utilised existing Generative Adversarial Networks and Reinforcement Learning techniques to produce a control system for a quadruped.