Thomas Hockaday
Software developer with a background in design. Focused on user and developer experience. Building optimised, accessible, and testable systems. Working in small full stack teams since 2017.
Skills
Languages:
- PHP
- JavaScript/TypeScript
- MySQL/PostgreSQL
- HTML
- CSS
Tools:
- React
- Node.js
- Composer
- Docker
- AWS
- Git
- Redis
- OpenAPI
Methodologies:
- CI/CD
- OOP
- SOLID
- REST
- DDD
- TDD
Experience
Blackbullion
Head of Engineering, 2025+
- Defined, documented and maintained secure, scalable and reliable system architecture.
- Mentored engineers to support both technical and professional growth.
- Provided technical input into product strategy to help shape long-term direction.
- Defined efforts to reduce tech debt and push innovation.
Senior Engineer, 2025
- Solved historic version control conflicts to enable increased deployment frequency.
- Reinforced CI testing processes and cut total pipeline runtime down by 50%.
- Acted as first technical touch point during early-stage project planning sessions with stakeholders.
Intelligence Fusion / Sigma7
Tech Lead, 2023 – 2024
- Led a major optimization project achieving a 13x performance increase documented in a Sentry case study.
- Developed a data cloning tool which boosted the operations team reporting output by 10%.
- Implemented PHP and Playwright end-to-end testing solutions to safeguard critical paths.
- Automated Prettier and ESLint code quality checks. Resolved a validation bug in the eslint-plugin-react ruleset.
- Migrated Postman documentation to OpenAPI to improve developer and client collaboration.
Lead Software Engineer, 2022 – 2023
- Upgraded underling API technologies reducing code execution time by over 20%.
- Automated CI static analysis using PHPCodeSniffer, PHPStan, and PHPInsights.
- Optimized database usage with Redis caching and enhanced login security via rate limiting.
- Conducted thorough performance reviews fostering rapid team development.
Senior Software Engineer, 2021 – 2022
- Refactored an event-sourced Lumen API to improve performance and developer experience.
- Led sprint planning and supported recruitment and onboarding.
Software Engineer, 2020 – 2021
- Built high-performance threat intelligence REST API endpoints handling 60 requests/second per client.
- Defined CI/CD rules in GitLabCI for automated testing and deployment.
- Compiled Postman API documentation to streamline onboarding.
Opia Ltd
Web Developer, 2017 – 2020
- Built high-volume promotional websites using PHP, Vue, Blade, Sass, MySQL, and Docker.
- Commended by Microsoft for WCAG 2.1 compliance. Awarded by Huawei for excellence in campaign development.