I'm currently responsible for 5 in-house development teams, as well as a number of external suppliers, at Macmillan Science and Education. We build and maintain applications to support scientific journal publishing and classified advertising to academia, primarily using Ruby on Rails, Java, Scala, PHP and XQuery. As part of the digital systems management team I'm also involved in developing technology strategy across the organisation, and work closely with the product office and broader business. Previously I was at Songkick.com, a London-based startup aiming to make it easier to discover live music. I joined Songkick shortly after it was founded, and played a central role in building the engineering organisation, delivering the initial versions of the site and defining development practices. I was also responsible for setting up Songkick's data science team. In all of these roles my focus has been on creating an environment where talented software developers are able to be extremely productive. As well as working closely with individual team members to ensure that their skills are put to best use, this involves agile practices, creating a culture of communication and collaboration, devops and an emphasis on using well designed software architecture to remove friction from the development process.

Head of Development (New Publishing Platforms) @ This is an extension of my previous responsibilities to cover the whole of the newly created New Publishing Platforms team, tasked with the creation of a modern, dynamic publishing platform to replace a number of legacy systems. As well agile, iterative development of the application tier in Ruby on Rails, we're responsible for the Content Hub, a content repository using linked data technology to allow easy discovery and reuse of published material. In this role I'm responsible for 5 in-house scrum cells, as well as a number of external suppliers. From April 2014 to Present (1 year 9 months) Development Manager @ In this role I was responsible for a ten person team of developers, mostly working with Ruby on Rails, who contributed to the ongoing development of the Macmillan publishing platform, supporting the Nature family of academic journals as well as a number of other titles. I was also involved in architectural decision making and software development strategy across the broader development organisation. From July 2013 to April 2014 (10 months) Chief Scientist @ My final major project at Songkick was the establishment of a dedicated data science team, whose remit was to provide advanced data collection, processing and reporting capabilities across the company. This played an important role in business and product development, as well as enabling new product features which made direct use of large scale data analysis. In this role I had managerial responsibility for 2-3 people. From October 2012 to July 2013 (10 months) Chief Architect @ As Songkick grew I made a transition from team leadership to focus more on technology strategy. During this period the Songkick engineering team embarked on a successful project to transition to a service oriented architecture as a means to address technical debt and improve productivity. We also moved further towards continuous delivery, ultimately deploying new code to production multiple times a day. From January 2011 to September 2012 (1 year 9 months) Chief Technical Officer @ I joined Songkick shortly after the company was founded, initially as a developer helping to put together the original prototype version of the site, and eventually taking on more of a leadership role as the company's initial CTO. In this role I was responsible for software development and technical operations during the first phase of Songkick's growth, which corresponded to the transition from a two person development team to one consisting of ten engineers. As well as general team and technology leadership, I was heavily involved in recruitment and defining development culture and practices. Songkick was one of the original set of companies which helped establish the 'Silicon Roundabout' cluster of startups around Old Street in East London. The company is funded by top-tier investors including Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures and Y Combinator, and has been featured countless times in the national and international press. From August 2007 to December 2010 (3 years 5 months) Postdoctoral Research Associate @ Primarily as lead developer of Dasher, a novel predictive text entry system. From January 2006 to October 2007 (1 year 10 months) Contractor @ Research on search ranking using language modelling. From 2006 to 2007 (1 year)

PhD, Computer Science / Machine Learning @ University of Cambridge From 2001 to 2005 BA/MSci, Natural Sciences (Experimental and Theoretical Physics), First-class honours @ University of Cambridge From 1997 to 2001 Phil Cowans is skilled in: Agile Methodologies, Architecture, Science, Web Application Design, Start-ups, Technology Management, Scalability, Ruby on Rails, Linux, Ruby, Software Development, Information Retrieval, Business Strategy, Statistical Modeling, C++