Will Hunt

Senior Software Engineer

UK (Remote)

Senior engineer with a passion for free software that respects privacy. I've worked across the whole range of the software stack, from React through to Rust. My best work comes from an ability to rapidly prototype, while keeping a firm eye on overall architecture.

Element

Senior Custom Integrations Engineer

August 2024 - Present

  • LiveKit
  • WebRTC
  • Crypto
  • a11y
  • CSS

Having spent a stint working under the hosted services business, I moved onto working on the Customer Success side of the business, joining as their sole engineer.

The role gave me the agency to work right across the business, leveraging my knowledge of our architecture to unblock customers with whatever issues they had and integrating tightly with other teams.

My role has included

  • Working with active customers to identify an ideal solutions to features or bugs, and implementing them.
  • Working on stability fixes for our VoIP product.
  • Refactoring large chunks our web applications to be compliant to accessibility standards ahead of certification.
  • Working on high priority security issues to meet short deadlines.
  • Building out a telemetry service for customers to report details of their deployment for the purpose of support requests and product research.

Senior Engineer / Tech Lead

July 2019 - August 2024

  • Ansible
  • AWS
  • Docker
  • Go
  • JavaScript
  • Kubernetes
  • Next.JS
  • Node.JS
  • PostgreSQL
  • Prometheus
  • Python
  • React
  • Rust
  • Stripe
  • TypeScript

I joined Element after completing my degree, starting as the sole engineer on the Integrations team. As the company expanded, my remit grew and I became the Tech Lead for the Integrations and Billing teams.

My role has included

  • Architecting and developing Element One, a monthly subscription service for Matrix.
  • Building several enterprise integrations from scratch for Element such as a Microsoft Teams bridge.
  • Leading technical conversations and architectural plans on several projects, specifically around platform authentication and software packaging.
  • Built several features for the Element messaging client, such as custom notification sounds for rooms and richer integrations for bots.
  • Developing a billing system to facilitate advanced cost models, such as pay-per-active-user and pay-per-sent-message.
  • Responsible for the health of the SaaS platform, able to jump onto issues and organise the team around the problem rapidly.
  • Becoming the lead technical contact for our on-premise customers, often doing rapid fixes to customer issues in exotic environments.

Freelance Software Engineer

September 2018 - July 2019

I worked at Element, then New Vector, as a part-time contractor during my final year at University. This included spearheading a new project to provide a XMPP & Sametime gateway and creating a migration tool to move customer data from other platforms to EMS (Element's SaaS hosting product).

Intern Software Engineer

Summer of 2018

I started working for Element, then New Vector, as an intern during the summer after completing a successful Google Summer of Code project for matrix.org. I worked on the IRC, Gitter and Slack bridge projects in both a software and operations capacity. This meant managing community contributed patches, chat rooms and help guides.

Veritas

2017-2018

Intern Software Engineer

  • .NET
  • C#
  • Windows Server

I worked at Veritas during my year out in industry at university under the cloud email archive team.

Education

University of Portsmouth (2015-2019) - BSC (Hons) Computer Science, 2:1

Community Work & Interests

ConFuzzled

I volunteer for the ConFuzzled convention, having been a long time attendee. In this role, I have worked on features such as adding interactive maps, live event reporting, and improving the accessibility of the site.

Homelab Network

I'm a keen self hosting enthusiast. I run half-shot.uk off my own server stack, including hosting services such as Nextcloud for friends and family.

Talks