Simon
McFerran

Cyber-security software company based in Boston, MA, specialising in threat detection, vulnerability management, and incident response.

Technical Leadership & Team Enablement

• Driver to Enabler: Shifted focus from individual contribution to empowering the team, coaching engineers to take full ownership of complex upgrades and feature builds, increasing overall team velocity while maintaining delivery against roadmap.
• Stack Modernisation: Led the migration from Lerna to Nx and oversaw major version upgrades (Node 16→22, React 16→18), mitigating security vulnerabilities, improving developer experience, and establishing the foundation for a future Micro-frontend architecture.
• MUI Design System: Drove team-wide adoption of the MUI design system within Data Collection Management, ensuring consistent code standards and long-term maintainability across the codebase.

Cross-functional Impact

• Ransomware Detection Integration: Led a high-priority, time-sensitive feature integration coordinating tightly across PM, UX, and backend teams, delivering ahead of deadline.
• NGAV Implementation: Took ownership of Next-Gen Antivirus (NGAV) implementation across Mac and Linux, alongside additional initiatives including Exclusions and Agent Groups.
• Package Installers: Oversaw development of a self-service download capability for NGAV/RP installers, reducing customer wait time from hours to seconds and saving an estimated $188 per avoided support ticket.
• Distributed Team Integration: Successfully embedded Prague engineers into the Marauders agile workflow, delivering the Unified Navigation update and aligning both teams on the MUI design system.

Quality & Engineering Standards

• Testing Culture: Introduced Cypress for end-to-end testing, expanded unit test coverage with React Testing Library, and established Datadog synthetic monitoring for critical production user flows.
• Technical Debt: Championed the inclusion of technical debt items in every sprint, reducing production incidents and increasing long-term team capacity for feature development.
• Infrastructure Breadth: Extended into infrastructure and deployment tooling, working with Terraform and Jenkins pipeline configuration to remove team bottlenecks.

Mentorship & Leadership

• Team Development: Mentored multiple engineers across the team, supporting a colleague’s path to senior promotion and guiding others to take full ownership of complex feature builds.
• Performance Management: Led difficult but necessary performance conversations and personnel decisions that improved team cohesion, focus, and delivery velocity.
• Agile Facilitation: Led sprint planning, retrospectives, and milestone management, while proactively reducing operational load on engineering management.

Consumer Tech focused innovation lab based in Belfast, NI.

Cross-functional Impact

• Hardware/Firmware Coordination: Oversaw and coordinated external contractors responsible for hardware and firmware development of the latest generation Belume IoT devices, bridging software and hardware teams.
• Process Formalisation: Introduced stand-ups for the team, check-ins with external contractors, moving toward a more Agile process for software engineering internally.

Technical Strategy

• Code Quality Initiative: Conducted internal audits of code repositories and introduced good practices around security, code formatting and maintenance, versioning, tagging, and documentation.
• Full-stack Ownership: Built, maintained, and deployed React-Native (TypeScript) mobile app with REST API (NodeJS/Express) to AWS.

Mentorship & Leadership

• Formalised internal communication and information sharing processes across engineering team.
• Introduced Agile ceremonies and practices to improve team velocity and transparency.

UX led software house based in Belfast, NI.

Cross-functional Impact

• Design Partnership: Worked closely with UX research and design team to produce functioning rapid prototypes in React and VueJS, enabling thorough user testing of new concepts and design paradigms.
• Product Collaboration: As sole development resource on ventures projects, worked with product owners to roadmap features and led design teams through technical decision-making process.
• Multi-disciplinary Leadership: Led engineering team on corporate innovation platform build, coordinating across frontend, backend, and infrastructure.

Technical Strategy

• Design Systems: Built living style-guides and front-end component libraries in React to enable rapid development while maintaining consistent UI across multiple products.
• Architecture Decisions: Led greenfield build of corporate innovation platform on JAM stack with React/TypeScript frontend, NodeJS/Express API in Docker, and MongoDB.
• Tech Stack Ownership: Responsible for viability exploration and tech stack decisions on ventures team projects.
• Scalability: Employed cloud-based hosting with integrated CI/CD pipeline and serverless technology for rapid scaling capability.

Mentorship & Leadership

• Led engineering team on multiple greenfield projects.
• Lead UX Engineer role on Australian bank MVP, guiding technical implementation.
• Mentored design team through technical feasibility discussions and decision-making processes.

Cyber-security software company based in Boston, MA.

Cross-functional Impact

• Organisation-wide Standards: Evangelised visual standards by driving reusability, consistency, and component discussions across engineering teams.
• Development Lifecycle Optimisation: Optimised the development lifecycle while ensuring design viability by building functional prototypes in React to enable user testing.

Technical Strategy

• Framework Establishment: Established a UX engineering framework for rapid prototyping.
• Reusable Infrastructure: Maintained and contributed to React repositories distributed via NPM for cross-organisation consumption.
• Brand Consistency: Maintained brand-consistent template library on data capture platform (Pendo).

Mentorship & Leadership

• Intern Program: Worked with local universities annually to recruit and mentor interns in UX Engineering.
• Knowledge Sharing: Drove discussions on component reusability and consistency patterns across multiple engineering teams.

Award winning creative digital agency based in Belfast, NI.

Cross-functional Impact

• Client Delivery: Lead Front-End on major client projects including Viridian Group Energy Portal and Permanent TSB CMS integration.
• Marketing Enablement: Built mobile-responsive portal with CMS capabilities for business marketing teams.

Technical Strategy

• Workflow Introduction: Played integral role in introducing front-end development workflow process, including boilerplate framework used as platform for all UI development.
• Modernisation: Introduced CSS preprocessor (Sass) and helped develop more modular front-end architecture.
• Legacy Replacement: Delivered modern replacement for legacy Energy Online System with mobile-responsive portal.
• API Integration: Delivered CMS solution with Web API integration to TSB’s internal CRM System (WAMS).

Mobile e-commerce and integration specialist based in Belfast, NI.

Developed mobile-first e-commerce solutions with focus on performance and user experience. Built custom integrations for retail clients during the early mobile web era.

Furniture manufacturer and supplier based outside Belfast, NI.

Established web presence and digital design standards for manufacturing business. Created marketing materials and web assets supporting sales operations during early career phase.