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.

Industry Experience

Element

Senior Engineer / Tech Lead

July 2019 - Present

  • 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.

My roles included:

  • Spearheading a new project to provide a XMPP & Sametime gateway.
  • Creating a migration tool to move data from Hipchat and Slack to EMS (then Modular.im, 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.

My role included taking up maintainership of the IRC, Gitter and Slack bridge projects in both a software and operations capacity. This meant managing community contributed patches to various Matrix.org projects, as well as bug reports and helping users to get started with the projects.

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. My responsibilities involved supporting customers across different regions, and helping the migration of our cloud infrastructure to Microsoft Azure.

Education

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

Community Work and 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