Ross Heritage

Public Company; 10,001+ employees; BBC; Broadcast Media industry

November 2010 – July 2011 (9 months)

Technical Authority for BBC News, Sport/2012 Olympics, Weather & Travel News, Homepage & Search, Childrens (CBBC, CBeebies), and Knowledge & Learning (BBC Food, Bitesize, Webwise, Nature etc) products, across Web, Mobile, and IPTV based services.

This includes many product enablers such as content management and publishing systems, mass participation/social tools such as quizzes, vote systems, recommendation systems etc, and also the BBC Search systems, both public facing and internal.

I lead a team of technical architects and technical leads that in turn lead the engineering teams across FM News & Knowledge (150 technical staff), and played a central role on the management team in the division.

Public Company; 10,001+ employees; BBC; Broadcast Media industry

October 2007 – November 2010 (3 years 2 months)

Responsible for the design and technical architecture of all web serving and content delivery infrastructures behind all Journalism based sites (i.e. BBC News, Sport, Weather etc).

Provided a technical architecture and technical authority role in several key projects, including the relaunch of the News website onto the www.bbc.co.uk domain and the relaunch of BBC Weather to be the first fully dynamic high traffic website in the BBC Online family.

I defined the infrastructure behind the first on-demand embedded video offering used on the News and Sports websites, putting in place the distribution systems to ensure the timely delivery of content to a resilient set of origin servers, along with putting in place all the CDN based distribution systems for the serving of these assets.

I also played a key role in FM&T Digital Distribution team, representing the operational needs of not only Journalism systems, but also for all systems used across the other FM&T divisions.

August 2006 – October 2007 (1 year 3 months)

I took responsibility for the design, development, and day-to-day operation of all aspects of content distribution and web serving infrastructure used by the business. This included a complicated arrangement of caching and web servers designed to maximise the performance of the lastminute.com platform through the minimising of the load on the myriad of 2nd- tier and 3rd-tier dynamic applications.

I was responsible for refactoring exercise significantly reducing the complexity of the operation, whilst simultaneously increasing the performance using the existing infrastructure. I was also responsible for the introduction of a range of real-time monitoring and analytics systems that gave a view into the state of the operation at any given time, improving up-time and leading to a capacity planning function going forward.

I contributed to the technical design of all systems that formed part of the lastminute.com platform, and performed a role as a change authoriser for all aspects of the lastminute.com platform. I was also responsible for managing the relationships with a range of external suppliers, working especially closely
with CDN network providers (both Akamai and Mirror-Image), and NOC/data centre operations in various parts of the world.

Public Company; 10,001+ employees; BBC; Broadcast Media industry

May 2000 – June 2006 (6 years 2 months)