Barry Houghton

01 Profile

03 Career History

1. Lead Engineer · Cognassist

   Sept 2021 – June 2026

   Lead engineer on a SaaS platform delivering cognitive assessment, adaptive learning and AI-driven coaching. Working across an event-driven microservices architecture (~40 services, 200+ projects).

   • Migrated ~20 services into a single monorepo, updating CI/CD pipelines, Docker configurations and shared message contracts, improving cross-service consistency and release reliability.
   • Drove and delivered the .NET 6 → 8 upgrade across APIs, background services and Azure Functions, including migration to the isolated worker model and App Insights connection-string migration.
   • Designed and implemented key parts of the public API and webhook platform, including endpoint design, versioning, deprecation lifecycle, OpenAPI documentation and webhook invocation logging.
   • Implemented cross-service GDPR anonymisation flows, using integration messages to coordinate deletion across multiple services.
   • Delivered features using Azure OpenAI, including dynamic content generation and qualitative feedback summarisation.
   • Integrated agentic coding tools (Claude Code) into delivery, establishing a structured plan–review–implement workflow and custom agents to improve development speed while maintaining code quality and test coverage.
   • Owned the design and delivery of an email verification service with Auth0 integration, propagating the email_verified flag through the access token and login-flow actions deployed via Terraform.
   • Built a distributed export pipeline using background processing and cloud storage, with payloads delivered via webhooks.
   • Built backend features for a new Supabase-based web app — auth flows, Edge Functions (Deno/TypeScript) and database-triggered processing via pg_net.
   • Containerised and integrated a statistical scoring pipeline (R), supporting repeatable scoring runs across evolving datasets.
   • Implemented and extended event-driven messaging patterns (Azure Service Bus) across multiple services, improving decoupling and system resilience.
   • Integrated several third-party platforms (LMS, community, email), including user provisioning, webhooks and lifecycle management.

   Stack: C# 12, .NET 8, ASP.NET Core, FastEndpoints, MediatR (CQRS), CAP, Azure Service Bus, EF Core, Dapper, Refit, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Redis, Azure Functions, .NET Aspire, Kubernetes, KEDA, Helm, Terraform, Docker, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Supabase, pg_net, Auth0, Azure OpenAI, Langfuse, GrowthBook, xUnit, Reqnroll, FluentAssertions, Testcontainers, SonarCloud, StyleCop, Trivy.

2. Technical Lead · Fairstone

   Apr 2019 – Sept 2021

   • Provided technical leadership across the team, improving engineering practices including dependency injection, testing, code structure and release processes.
   • Improved CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps, increasing deployment frequency and overall release stability.
   • Migrated legacy workloads to Azure-native services (Functions, Data Factory, Databricks), improving scalability and processing performance.
   • Designed and built a document generation platform using Azure Functions, supporting scalable and cost-effective processing.
   • Delivered a dynamic reporting system with query-building capabilities, enabling users to generate and export custom datasets.
   • Implemented workflow orchestration using Durable Functions, supporting long-running and stateful processes.
   • Built a document management and distribution system, including back-office tooling for publishing, approval and access control.
   • Developed a proof-of-concept using Azure Cognitive Services to extract and classify data from identity documents.
3. Software Architect · j2 Cloud Services / Campaigner

   Nov 2018 – Apr 2019

   • Produced architecture and technical design documentation for integrating enterprise email marketing functionality into a wider SaaS platform.
4. Lead Software Developer · Communicator

   Jun 2008 – Nov 2018

   • Developed scalable SaaS solutions for an email marketing platform using distributed services and messaging patterns.
   • Implemented notification and real-time messaging systems using Azure services and SignalR.
   • Led development initiatives, mentored developers and contributed to CI/CD automation.