TLDR;

My LinkedIn …. No emotional reasons behind my career choices lay here though!

The long(er) version

I am Nicky Wrightson, Principal Engineer formally of Skyscanner and of FT

I have worked my ways through many industries - Travel, Telcomms, Financial Sector. Not surprisingly as I have been around for a while now I have been witness to many architectures - The good, bad and the ugly … I have contributed to ALL of those too!

Now in the systems I help build I optimise for operability, speed of delivery and/or cost. However all those three aspects are directly in conflict with each other, you must understand your requirements are to understand your compromises.

A little background drivel - I started life out at a consultancy. Then had a wild decade of contractoring globally which took me through the telcoms industry through to front-end office trading systems via some short stints in the music industry and other parts of the financial sector. I basically flip-flopped between perm and contract, learning skills then getting a contract wage from applying those. That journey is something I could write reams on in itself however I now can’t really think of going back towards the contract market as I started to get passionate about aspects that I just could not fufill in contract roles.

I wanted to insitigate change for good - whether that be technical, social, process or organisational, as a contractor that was hard. Plus I was stuck in older tech teams within the financial services sector - My mind was yet to be blow to elastic compute and how we had so much more influence we had when we were working in the cloud.

I was persuaded to try out the Financial Times where I was launched head first into a greenfield microservices architecture, a home grown container orchestration system followed by kubernetes, knowledge graphs ….. I was hooked on modern software engineering. It was at the FT while leading the Content Platform that I was promoted to principal engineer. Unfortunately my time at the FT came to an end as they moved the content platform to Bulgaria. From there I decided I wanted to move on to a bigger company - So I joined Skyscanner

I was working as principal engineer at Skyscanner working on the data platform, fuelling the data driven decision making and machine learning. I walked into this role without understanding much about big data at all - which is actually why I chose to work in this field. When I made that choice I knew I had a lot to learn but what I didn’t appreciate was that I would have to throw out nearly every comfortable design paradigm I had in my toolkit when you started talking about scale of circa 2 million messages per second.

This was a hard step up for me but at the end of the day I think that a principal’s role should be able to switch between domains and definitely switch technologies. My view is that often there are several archetypes of a principal engineer - some might be deeply technically, domain specialised whilst others might be better at delivering longer term strategy exerting influence accross many squads/tribes or even further extending that influence outside the organisation to the wider tech community. I certainly at the moment fit into the later but find myself chaging roles depending on the organisation or even initiative. I plan to write more on this topic as a post ….