Steve Lake

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT STEVE LAKE

A Senior Principal Architect with a polyglot background. I specialise in whole system architectural & technical strategy for massively scalable, distributed, high-performance SaaS platforms. Building a great people culture is a superpower and a key success driver. I love taking time to listen and mentor, with my happy place working with engineers to build a shared understanding of complex ideas, developing buildable solutions and communicating to stakeholders, up to C-suite.My career is anchored in three major themes:• Resilient ScalingThe past 6 years has been a wild ride of keeping the technical platform able to support the commercial hyper-growth journey from small start-up to big corporate. Technically, I focus on compute, data platform design, DC topology and scaling of our cloud based (Own DC/AWS/GCP) massive in-memory distributed planning engine system that operates at SaaS scale. Our software is mission critical for our corporate customers, so resilience and consistency of calculation at scale are the main drivers.• Distributed SystemsDistributed systems feature heavily in my career. I led the design and hands-on build of an Investment Bank Front Office low-latency pricing engine. Understanding causality, consistency & latency in geographically dispersed compute drove its success. • High Performance SystemsMy early career focused on high-performance design & (hands-on) build of high-throughput multi-threaded low-latency compute engines in Java and C++. This imbued an understanding of mechanical sympathy & performance optimisation techniques such as lock free concurrency and objectless design, but also the software craftsmanship required for sustainable development of complex systems.