Steve R.

Steve R.

Senior Software Engineer

Melbourne, Australia
Hire Steve R. Hire Steve R. Hire Steve R.

About Me

Steve is a highly experienced product-focused Developer with close to two decades worth of expertise creating, collaborating and leading digital product development teams. He has strong technical abilities, an eye for design and experience in team leading with different startups and big companies in their development activities; delivering the right business value on solutions for clients.

Work history

UpStack
UpStack
Senior Software Developer
2019 - Present (5 years)
Remote
  • Creating and developing innovative software solutions for clients across a broad range of industries.

Xero
Xero
Senior Frontend Developer/Team Lead
2014 - 2019 (5 years)
Melbourne, Australia
  • Supervised and oversaw a team of 8 developers with a focus on onboard conversions; achieving a 16% to 20% uplift rate for the company.

  • Provided technical expertise for a technical debt removal solution; increasing cycle time for experiments/features from 3 months to a low single sprint.

  • Introduced and provided expertise for the use of analytics in product development processes to measure experiment effectiveness on projects for Xero.

xLabs
xLabs
Co-Founder/Product Lead/Advisor
2014 - 2016 (2 years)
Melbourne, Australia
  • Provided technical expertise and direction for market research and early customer engagement, product team mentoring, prototyping and commercial strategy development on projects within xLabs.

  • Offered coaching opportunities to highly technical academic co-founders within the company on lean product development and UX techniques; leading to a reduction in scope and prioritization of high value deliverables on projects for the company.

  • Led user and market research activities for the company; narrowing the company's focus to UX and market research verticals leading to lower costs and a more sustainable market position.

University of Queensland Julius Kruttschnitt Mineral Research Centre
University of Queensland Julius Kruttschnitt Mineral Research Centre
Lead Frontend Developer (Contract)
2012 - 2013 (1 year)
Brisbane, Australia
  • Efficiently led and provided production expertise for the UI development of a mathematically complex cloud-based simulation application for the client.

  • Initiated and created a UX appreciation culture within a highly technical environment on the project.

  • Produced a comprehensive developer friendly UX guide for product so the team could continue using established patterns (still evident after 6 years).

Independent Consultant
Independent Consultant
Product/UX Consultant
2009 - 2013 (4 years)
Remote
  • Offered technical expertise for web and mobile projects for clients; providing guidance on strategy, design and development.

  • Created linguaposta.com, a low-maintenance digital product that offers language products to students of French, German and Spanish.

  • Acted as a Product Management Consultant for 'The Conversation' Job Board - a revenue channel for this independent source of news and views from academia and the research community; successfully managed conflicting business and technical team concerns on the project.

Fairfax Media
Fairfax Media
Senior Designer/Product Manager
2006 - 2008 (2 years)
Melbourne, Australia
  • Provided expertise for the identifcation of patterns and practices that reduced development difficulties and increased design quality in a difficult legacy system and waterfall process.

  • Efficiently implemented innovative solutions for Fairfax Media; achieving a 3% uplift (4 – 7%) of key metrics on an executive targeted job board.

  • Successfully managed the partner relationship with Westfield who had conflicting goals to Fairfax Media; receiving excellent feedback from Westfield.

DeakinPrime (Now DeakinCo)
DeakinPrime (Now DeakinCo)
Senior Designer/Product Champion
2001 - 2006 (5 years)
Melbourne, Australia
  • Offered technical leadership to the team that created an enterprise content management system (CMS) for business compliance programs on projects.

  • Successfully presented a pitch to the CEO resulting in a $300k budget for the creation of the business compliance CMS that reduced cost of delivery by 70%.

  • Supervised and managed the delivery of DeakinPrime's business compliance CMS for use in 40+ client projects over 4 years.

Portfolio

Team Lead - Xero Dashboard
Team Lead - Xero Dashboard

Utilized technical know-how and experience in researching new approaches and pitching for a 6 months rebuild of the Xero Dashboard over the preferred 2-year costly rebuild of the legacy code. Provided technical leadership to the team and participated in the conduct of multiple experiments leading to a 4% uplift in conversion on the project for Xero.

Solo Developer - Fotopia Serverless
Solo Developer - Fotopia Serverless

Worked on this project to explore the possibility of using Serverless technologies for UI focused web application. The project served as a learning tool and contribution back to the developer community. It also includes publishing articles online; sharing experiences garnered over the years.

Solo Developer - Numbers Are Nice
Solo Developer - Numbers Are Nice

Numbers are nice is a small site dedicated to making it easy for kids to absorb maths through nice easy to follow posters. Worked on this as a solo project (micro business) similar to https://linguaposta.com - a poster sales site. The site uses GatsbyJs for ultra-fast performance and contains simple Math games that make the user experience on the site more engaging.

Education

Education
Postgraduate Diploma Interactive Media

Victorian College of Arts
1999 - 1999