Christopher Gell

Profile

A creative, sociable and well-organised person with strong intellectual, technical and delivery skills. Having 10+ years of experience working in a demanding and commercial environment, including technical and people leadership, I am a well-rounded Engineering leader. I enjoy helping teams achieve impactful outcomes through collaboration, coaching, and technical leadership.

Techincal Skills

  • Roadmaps, Backlogs
  • Stakeholder Managment
  • Python, PySpark, C# .NET
  • MLFlow, DevOps, Kubernetes
  • Databricks Platform
  • Microsoft Azure

Experience

Myrge @ BP

CTO & Co-Founder - Myrge | Principal Software Engineer - bp

November 2021 - Present

Myrge is an internal start-up within bp's venture studio that is focused on helping large enterprises increase their developer velocity. Our core product is Code-Review-as-a-Service, combining people and technology to deliver code reviews by experienced engineers within 15 minutes. As CTO I am focused on building the technology and team needed to achieve our business goals. As a co-founder I am also involved in all other aspects of the start-up.

Because Myrge is an internal start-up, all employees are employed through bp. Key aspects of the role and achievements to date are

  • Developed innovative tools for Code Review - Created tools to improve code review, including exploring and using Gen AI models to enable 1 reviewer to review code from 175 engineers.
  • 10x value over cost - Developed the tools and processes that enable scaling Myrge across bp, generating 10x value for bp over cost.
  • 20% month-on-month growth - Rolled out Myrge to cover all of bp in 18 months, growing the number of supported engineers by 20% month-on-month.
  • Scaling team to meet demand - grew engineering from 1 to 20+ engineers, creating new teams to focus on different produts within the platform.

M&G Plc

Head of Cloud Engineering | Cloud Platform Services

April 2021 - November 2021

Cloud Platform Services is a newly formed team in M&G, responsible for building and running M&G's Cloud platform (Azure). As Head of Cloud Engineering, my focus is on building core platform infrastructure, driving standards and supporting the wider adoption of Cloud across M&G.

Key aspects of the role and achievements are

  • Establish an Agile Delivery Framework for the team - Creating a structured approach to managing product and project backlogs, delivery tracking and stakeholder management.
  • Drive key Platform Deliveries to support M&G's cloud strategy - Implementing Ansible Tower for Automated Configuration Management of our IaaS estate, Enteprise Container Platform (Azure RedHat OpenShift), onboarding business workloads for the Investment Management and Customer & Distribution business units.
  • Career pathways for Cloud Engineers - Establishing a career pathway for Cloud Engineers within M&G.

M&G Plc

Head of Engineering | Investments Technology

March 2020 - April 2021

Leading a team of permanenent, contract and third-party partner Engineers in a "scaled agile" organisation. As Head of Engineering, I am accountable for ensuring a high performing Engineering capability that can deliver against our business priorities. The role focuses on people management, leadership as well as evolving, agreeing and driving the delivery of our Engineering strategy.

Key aspects of the role and achievements to date are

  • Representing the Investments Engineering team within the wider M&G organisation - Specifically on our PaaS-first adoption of cloud (Azure), DevOps and automation practices.
  • Created a community lead approach to sharing knowledge and standards & patterns adoption - Re-energised and expanded our Engineering Community of Practice. The community includes onshore, offshore and “vendor-provided” teams, creating an effective forum that drives knowledge sharing and standards.
  • Created a resourcing plan to meet our organisation’s location strategy and cost goals - Worked with Product Owners to onboard Engineers supplied by a third-party vendor as well as working with the vendor to ensure Engineers had the right skills and met expectations regarding experience levels.
  • Driving Technology oriented initiatives such as infrastructure upgrades, audit and security - by ensuring that they are visible and prioritised by the Product Owners across the team.
  • Involved in day-to-day delivery - Removing blockers, providing direction and taking decisions that I am accountable for.
  • Championing the adoption of a “you build it, you run it” culture - Working with central support teams on transitioning support into the product teams.

M&G Plc

Product Manager | Data Science and ML Platform

July 2019 - March 2020

Building upon the foundations put in place in my previous role, and backing from Senior Leadership, I took on the role of Product Manager for an accessible and scalable Enterprise Data Science and Machine Learning platform. The goal of the platform is to create a world class user experience for Data Scientists across M&G whilst ensuring that the appropriate controls are in place for a regulated Financial Services business. The role focuses on leadership, vision, roadmap, as well a building the relationships and partnerships needed to be successful.

Key aspects of the role were

  • Data/ML Techniques, Frameworks and Workflows - Deep understanding of the techniques, tools and workflows used by Data Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers to solve business problems.
  • Being A Champion for Data Scientists - Championing the needs of the Data Scientists, understanding their pain points and representing them within the wider Technology community.
  • Product Vision and Roadmap - Owning and communicating the Product Vision and Roadmap, ensuring the right capabilities are in place to achieve success.

M&G Plc

Machine Learning Engineering Lead | Chief Digital Office

June 2018 - July 2019

Working for the Chief Digital Officer as part of a small innovation team focused on enablement of new digital capabilities for M&G Prudential. By leveraging Azure Cloud PaaS components, DevOps tools and ML frameworks, I worked with Data Scientists to build the beginnings of a Data Science and Machine Learning platform that has since gained traction, along with the wider goal of growing this nascent capability throughout our business

Key aspects of the role are

  • Machine Learning Community of Practice - Fostering a growing community of Data Science / ML practitioners across the business and working with the community to understand needs, pains and constraints
  • Deployment Automation - Using various Azure based technologies and languages such as PowerShell, Azure Resource Templates and VSTS to create platform deployment pipelines for key components
  • Data/ML Platforms and Frameworks - Becoming familiar with Python, Apache Spark, Keras and other related tools and frameworks and integrating them into the wider platform

M&G Investments

Development Manager | Aladdin Technology Platform

December 2016 - June 2018

Development Manager leading a team of 20+ Developers building a modern digital platform for the M&G Investment Business. The platform wraps BlackRock Aladdin, making core investment data available for internal and external developers via RESTFul APIs. The plaftorm also ingerates BlackRock Aladdin within M&G's wider ecosystem, including the wider Prudential Group. M&G have become amongst the first financial services firms in the city to implement a fully fledged production system in the Azure Cloud

Key aspects of the project were

  • PaaS First - Developing and deploying into the Azure cloud, Leveraging PaaS resources for storage and service orchestration.
  • API centric - Extensive use of APIs implemented using a combination of Apigee Edge, Spring Boot deployed in Azure and backed by CosmosDB.
  • Agile and Continous Develivery - Use of Agile methods for planning and delivery, aiming towards Continous Delivery through extensive automation of testing and deployments. Currently able to release multiple times per week.

M&G Investments

Product Owner | Straight Through Processing

December 2013 - December 2016

As product owner I work with a wide spectrum of people including users, stakeholders and project managers. My role includes gathering requirements, sense checking/designing solutions and providing domain expertise over the products I manage. A key part of my role is to also manage the development team and process (Scrum), making priority calls and communicating progress.

M&G Investments

Technical Lead | Straight Through Processing

June 2011 - December 2013

Focusing on the design, development and delivery of a business critical STP platform for equities, fixed income and derivatives. I also manage the workloads of on-shore and off-shore developers, provide estimates, set expectations for business users, project managers and sponsors and communicate team progress.

As Techinical Lead I have played a key role in introducing agile development estimation and planning methods, which have since been adopted across the entire team. This is something I have a keen interest in.

M&G Investments

Software Developer | Integration

September 2009 - June 2011

After working in the RAD team, I joined the M&G's Data and Integration team. As a software developer I was involed in the development and delivery of a number of projects as well as small enhancements and BAU fixes. Some key projects are.

M&G Investments

RAD Analyst/Developer (Graduate)

September 2008 - September 2009

Working for the Rapid Application Development team, I focused on fast delivery of useable and robust desktop solutions to the M&G business. I gained experience developing Business Objects reports and VBA applications in Excel and Access, predominantly for Investment Operations systems

Education

University of Southampton

Computer Science (BSc)First Class


I graduated in June 2008 with a First Class Honors Degree in Computer Science where I specialised in Machine Learning and Computer Vision. My dissertation was titled "Localised Force Fields for Automated Ear Biometrics" and focused on researching and developing new computer vision techniques for ear biometrics.

On graduating, I received two awards from my department: The ICL Prize for best overall performance on my course and the Zepler Project Prize for my final year dissertation.

References

On request

Christopher Gell — LinkedIn