Australian software engineer with more than 30 years of experience building reliable, production grade systems. My focus is using software as a force multiplier, codifying the expertise of global authorities into tools that clinicians can use, so children with genetic disorders get faster and more accurate diagnoses.

Summary

More than 30 years of industry experience, including close to 15 years running an independent software consultancy alongside my employed roles, delivering solutions across legal, finance, insurance, aerial imagery and medical research.

I have a strong track record building large scale, commercially viable Software as a Service platforms, with deep expertise in cloud computing, microservices architecture and modern development practices, and I enjoy modernising ageing legacy architectures into performant, reliable and cost effective systems.

Experience

Software Engineer, Children's Medical Research Institute & Sydney Children's Hospitals Network
Feb 2023 – Present

Building the software platform, clinical decision support tooling and cloud infrastructure for a connected genomics research and diagnostics ecosystem.

Main projects
  • GENEie is the first evidence based clinical decision support software for accurate, confident clinical interpretation of extended splice site variants, producing ACMG aligned evidence for genetic pathology professionals.
  • RNA Cloud is a cloud based platform for clinical RNA sequencing analysis, covering orchestration, alignment, quality control and custom genome reference builds.
Supporting work
  • Lead engineer on data engineering pipelines assembling curated, clinically relevant reference datasets from sources such as Genomics England PanelApp, ClinVar and the Genome Reference Consortium.
  • Built and containerised HTTP APIs that wrap scientific tooling, for example SpliceAI scoring and pedigree plotting, so research methods run reliably as production services.
Owner, Simplicate Technology
May 2008 – Feb 2023

Founded and ran an independent software consultancy providing hosted web applications and technical consulting services, alongside employed roles for close to 15 years.

  • Advised clients on software architecture and cloud computing strategy.
  • Introduced CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code to speed up and de risk delivery.
  • Helped teams adopt higher quality software practices including automated testing, code review and modern development workflows.
  • Provided technical leadership and mentoring, and built and hosted proof of concept web products.
Software Architect, BizCover
Dec 2018 – Feb 2023

Chief architect of a platform delivering insurance products priced by intricate rating algorithms.

  • Designed rating algorithms involving dozens of parameters that return indicative pricing within milliseconds.
  • Architected the microservice platform that replaced BizCover's ageing legacy monolith.
  • Shaped the quality strategy across unit, integration, acceptance, functional and end to end testing.
Software Engineer, CommSec
Jan 2018 – Dec 2018

Enhanced the trading platform at the leading online stockbroking firm in Australia, an affiliate of the Commonwealth Bank.

  • Implemented the Standard Portfolio Analysis of Risk (SPAN), calculating maximum potential loss for a portfolio of derivatives and reducing the bank's exposure to volatile markets.
Senior Software Engineer, Nearmap
Oct 2014 – Nov 2017
  • Contributed significantly to a large scale, cloud hosted solution using a wide range of AWS services.
  • Introduced and expanded a modern C# .NET microservices architecture, phasing out a legacy monolith that was hampering international launch.
  • Designed a real time data collection workflow and gained significant experience running C# on Linux via Mono.
Technical Lead, Within Reach Software
Aug 2013 – Sep 2014
  • Delivered projects across the superannuation and startup sectors.
  • Provided solutions and technical advice to enterprise customers such as Gadens Lawyers and to startups such as Geepers.
Tech Lead, Community Engine
Mar 2011 – Dec 2012
  • Led development of a social ecommerce platform with ASP.NET MVC 3 and 4, C#, MongoDB and jQuery.
  • Used AppHarbor, TeamCity, AWS (EC2, S3, SQS, Route 53), Git and GitHub, with continuous integration enabling reliable fortnightly deployments.
Senior Developer, Blake Dawson
Jan 2005 – Jan 2012

Three tier web based solutions as a Senior Developer and Analyst Programmer at the law firm, now Ashurst.

  • Helped design and implement SALT, a multi tenant SaaS legal training application, one of the first major implementations of ASP.NET 1.1 in Australia.
  • Integrated line of business systems for matter opening automation using BizTalk 2004, InfoPath 2007 and SharePoint 2007.
Analyst Programmer, AMP (IT@AMP)
2000 – 2003
  • Worked on the high profile amp.com.au site within AMP's eBusiness team.

Selected Projects

A selection from github.com/PeterKneale.

Bioinformatics & tooling
bioassertRust
Bioinformatics assertion CLI for validating and gating pipeline outputs, with first class Nextflow integration.
nf-command-archiverGroovy
Nextflow tooling for archiving the commands run by pipeline tasks.
bioinformatics_knowledge_basePython
A curated knowledge base of bioinformatics notes and references.
SaaS & multi tenancy
modular_monolith_saasC#, Postgres
Modular monolith SaaS starter solution for medium to large products.
micro-saasC#, Postgres
Multi tenant modular monolith with DDD and tenant isolation via Postgres row level security.
HybridMicroOrmC#
A lightweight, JSON based micro ORM for PostgreSQL with built in multi tenant support.
multi-tenant-dapper-postgres-rlsC#, Dapper
Multi tenant data access using Dapper and Postgres row level security.
multi-tenant-grpc-postgres-rlsC#, gRPC
Multi tenant application using gRPC, Dapper and Postgres row level security.
Microservices & cloud
k8s-dotnet-microservicesC#, Kubernetes
.NET microservices in a monorepo, deployed to Kubernetes with GitHub Actions.
serverless-dotnet-microservicesC#, AWS
Serverless .NET microservices in a monorepo SaaS.
microservices.chassisC#
A microservices chassis providing reusable service scaffolding.
transactional_outboxC#
A demonstration of the transactional outbox pattern.
aws_lightsail_github_actionsC#, AWS
Deploying a .NET application to AWS Lightsail with GitHub Actions.
Patterns & domain driven design
ddd_ef_core_and_postgresC#
Domain driven design with EF Core and Postgres.
design_patternsC#
A collection of design pattern examples.
EnvoyC#
A mediator pattern implementation.
DiscountsC#
A microservice demonstrating how to handle discounts.