About

Adrian Woodhead is a highly experienced Principal Software Engineer with over 20 years of professional experience in a wide variety of technologies. He has worked for companies ranging from two-person startups to fully fledged businesses with tens of millions of users. Adrian has strong written and verbal communication skills and takes pleasure in writing code and interacting with people. He enjoys working on the entire software development life cycle, from planning and architecture through to coding and testing. Most of his experience is working with and leading teams of software developers. Adrian is experienced in the development of highly available, scalable enterprise systems as well as open source and multimedia applications. His specialties include Java, Big Data, Open Source, Hadoop, Linux, Spring, Scalability, Distributed Systems, Hive, Git, Kafka, Unit Testing, SQL, and XML. Currently, Adrian is working as a Principal Software Engineer at HUMAN, where he is involved in the development of a data platform. He has also worked as a Principal Engineer and Technical Team Manager at Expedia and Hotels.com, where he helped tackle their “big data” challenges. This involved leading a team of developers working on complex data sets consisting of hundreds of millions of items across different product areas to enable analysis. The core technologies used were Hadoop, Cascading, Hive, and Java. Adrian has a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Industrial Psychology from Rhodes University. He also holds certifications as a Sun Certified Developer and Sun Certified Programmer for the Java 2 Platform. Adrian's tech stack includes Software Engineering, testing, Big Data, SQL, Java, Hadoop, Kafka, AWS, Spring, Apache Hive, and Data Warehouse. With 24.46 years of relevant experience, Adrian is a seasoned software developer and technical team lead with a passion for solving complex problems and delivering high-quality software solutions.