Engineering
Building and leading software teams that deliver reliable, scalable SaaS products
Engineering Manager
LearnUpon, January 2023 to March 2024
Managed a team of 7 front-end (Angular) and back-end (Ruby on Rails) engineers delivering features and refactoring projects for LearnUpon's enterprise learning management platform.
Stabilised the team and re-established cohesion following company layoffs. Delivered high-profile major features and led refactoring projects that improved platform reliability. Drove a cross-team initiative that optimised database performance, reducing slow queries by 10%. Unified nine engineering managers around cross-team improvements, including introducing standardised OKR planning across engineering.
Worked closely with product management, SRE, design, marketing, InfoSec, and EngOps. Responsible for recruitment, coaching, and career development of the team.
Founder
Dan Laffan Software Ltd, October 2020 to December 2024
Founded a solo venture to design and build a next-generation SaaS ERP system for small and medium-sized businesses.
Architected the platform using multiple Ruby on Rails engines and Hotwire, and built out self-service onboarding, feature management, user permissioning, a UI component library, and an in-app messaging and notification system. Paused the project in 2022 for family reasons; continued to maintain and iterate on the codebase through 2024.
Head of Product Engineering & Deputy CTO
Sonru, Dublin, 2015 to 2020
Recruited as a senior software engineer and promoted to team leader within six months, then to development manager, and ultimately to head of product engineering and deputy CTO.
Led the rebuild of Sonru's entire video interviewing platform using Ruby on Rails, MySQL, AWS, jQuery, VueJS, Redis, Resque, and ElasticSearch. Reduced technical debt by 90%, enabling significantly faster feature development. Grew and managed a team of up to 14 people across development, dev-ops, QA, UX/product, and InfoSec.
Drove platform-wide GDPR compliance and ISO-27001 certification. Managed significant SOAP and REST API integrations with enterprise HR platforms including Oracle and IBM. Served as the main technical contact for enterprise clients including Lego, CERN, Qatar Airways, UBS, Sainsbury's, and WestPac Bank.
Managed the transition of the team through Sonru's acquisition by Modern Hire in July 2020, including handling the post-acquisition redundancy process.
Chief Technology Officer
Learn Signal, Dublin, 2014 to 2015
Rebuilt the company's e-learning platform from the ground up in Ruby on Rails.
Designed and built the platform, managed the specification process, and used Agile to manage the project. Deployed on custom-configured AWS infrastructure. The platform included e-commerce, course content and web content management, SEO management, and third-party integrations for user tracking, communications, video transcoding and delivery, and payment processing. The platform launched in March 2015, serving 6,000 requests per day during its soft launch.
Lead Rails Developer
Cluey Systems, Dublin, 2013 to 2014
Designed and built the business logic for most of the back-office application and API for Cluey's next-generation cloud-based EPOS system for the hospitality sector.
Implemented most of the automated test suite. Managed code deployment and infrastructure on AWS. Used Agile and test-driven development throughout. Cluey had a successful exit to a global financial institution, a process in which I provided technical due-diligence support.
Co-Founder & COO / Rails Developer
Trezur, Dublin, 2008 to 2011
Built the MVP of Trezur's ecommerce web application — my first commercial Rails project.
The app delivered the company's website, customer sign-up and payment processing, software licence key management, and the API for the company's Windows application, with integrations including Paypal and song lyrics providers.