Christopher Little, Engineering Manager

Managing an international team of six external and internal developers, I am currently responsible for the delivery of technical solutions to the problem of global financial inclusion. My management approach is marked by thoughtful roadmap planning and intelligent system architecture, and by an insistence on high-quality testing, documentation and automation through CI/CD.

As well as this managerial work, I am also involved in practical coding work across front and back-end on a mostly severless AWS stack - especially in the early prototype stages of a project.

I started Tyro to tackle the technical skills gap in Uganda. I combined a unique curriculum of modern development skills with a collaborative Agile workflow which allowed our apprentices to work on commercial projects with very limited practical experience.

I was directly involved in the recruitment of a team of nine local developers of mixed abilities, and was responsible for continuously monitoring their learning and development alongside making technical contributions on more advanced projects.

As part of Entrepreneur First's EF7 cohort, I first founded an AI-driven platform for optimising and expanding chatbots' dialogue repertoires. Realising that our product had little commercial appeal, I instead joined another team to build and scale an automated mortgage robo-advice platform for both mortgage brokers and consumers.

Wanting to consolidate and verify my understanding of modern systems architecture and the AWS cloud in particular, I challenged myself to sit these two challenging exams in late November. I have already passed the Certified Developer exam, and will be sitting the Solutions Architect next week.

I took courses covering Programming Language Usability, Functional Programming, Security, Data-Processing Systems and Machine Learning. My final dissertation looked at building a hybrid graph database aiming to bridge the performance gap with relational databases.

For my undergraduate dissertation, I designed and implemented a novel type-inference system for JavaScript, and accompanying compiler to protect typed JavaScript from unchecked code. I went on to present this research at an international conference on functional programming.