Niall Thomson

Senior Solution Architect - AWS

  • EMAIL : thomson.niall@gmail.com
  • LOCATION : San Jose, CA, USA

About me

PROFESSIONAL PATH

Technology is something I've been interested in as long as I remember, and there was never any question what I would choose to do for a living. I've always been interested in learning everything and anything I can in order to build things that work, and thats propagated through to my career, where I've never dwelled in one area for long. Now I spend my time working on anything from application architecture, cloud infrastructure strategy and automation, and Devops processes and culture.

I was fortunate to be offered the opportunity to move my life from Scotland to the USA in 2012. I've grabbed that chance and never looked back. In the time since I've spent several years on both coasts and visited everywhere I can in between.

In my spare time I like to do some hiking, indoor rock climbing and drinking all the beer I can get my hands on. During the winter I like to do a bad impression of someone who knows how to snowboard.

Work Experience

PREVIOUS JOBS

PLATFORM ARCHITECT

PIVOTAL SOFTWARE
MAR 2018 - APR 2020

CLOUD ARCHITECT

VERINT SOFTWARE
JAN 2015 - FEB 2018

At Verint my role was to help drive technology and organizational change that would enable the company to transition its key products to the cloud. This was a key part of a change in strategy to begin to leverage SaaS business models in addition to its tradition of on-premise and hosted deployments.

  • Worked with product teams to inform application architecture for running on the cloud
  • Architected and led the implementation of a container-based platform hosted in AWS
  • Drove the adoption of infrastructure-as-code with Terraform, Packer and Chef
  • Brought focus to process and culture change around Devops and Continuous Delivery

TECHNICAL ARCHITECT

VERINT SOFTWARE
JAN 2012 - DEC 2014

As a member of the Kana Software Professional Services team in the US, I worked with multiple high profile clients in order to deliver customized solutions based on the Kana Enterprise CRM platform. This included:

  • Fulfill the role of lead technical resource with regards to the project delivery, providing design and direction to teams of developers
  • A high degree of interaction with the clients in order to develop requirements documents, technical specifications and detailed design documents through formal processes
  • Architecting solutions with significant amounts of custom integration to client back-end systems using a variety of technologies such as REST, SOAP and MQ

During this period I was involved in the successful delivery of multiple high-profile systems for these clients under tight timescales and budgets. Additionally, I developed an automated testing framework specific to the Kana Enterprise CRM product based on Selenium. This transformed the ability of our project team developers to build and maintain automated UI tests in a productive, scalable and maintainable manner.

SOFTWARE ENGINEER

SWORD CIBOODLE
APR 2011 - JAN 2012

During this time I worked as a member of the R&D team to develop the base Sword Ciboodle CRM product. The responsibilities included:

  • Developing features to specifications end-to-end, including automated tests, leveraging technologies such as Java, HTML, Javascript and CSS
  • Working as part of an agile team

My areas of focus included significant work on telephony platform integration, case management and campaign management. I also made a number of contributions in the form of personal projects, driven by my desire to develop personally as an engineer and improve the product suite in general. I was formally recognized multiple times for such projects during this time.

SALES ENGINEER

SWORD CIBOODLE
OCT 2009 - APR 2011

As part of the Sales Engineering team at Sword Ciboodle I was responsible for:

  • Working closely with the pre-sales team to develop custom demonstrations of the Sword Ciboodle CRM platform
  • Developing creative solutions in short time-scales, especially with regards to system integrations and proof of concept exercises
  • Assisting in responding to RFI/RFP requests in a technical capacity
  • Delivering technical segments of presentations and pitches to potential customers and analysts

Working in this role allowed me to quickly develop and understanding of the requirements of CRM systems across multiple sectors including insurance, telecommunications and utilities. I was also given the opportunity to build on my presentations and demo skills in front of technical audiences.

Education

ACADEMIC CAREER

MSC SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

HERIOT-WATT UNIVERSITY
GRADUATED NOV 2008 (18 MONTHS)

BSC COMPUTER SCIENCE

HERIOT-WATT UNIVERSITY
GRADUATED IN JUN 2007 (4 YEARS)