Pand T. G. Rushwood

panda@ticklethepanda.dev
ticklethepanda.dev
Lead developer passionate about building resilient data pipelines and developer environments. Strong in cloud environments, and collaborating across technical and non-technical teams to deliver impactful solutions.

Experience

  1. Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA)

    1. Data Engineer

      August 2023 to present

      Driving CREA’s mission by building scalable pipelines and delivering bespoke, high-impact analysis.

      • Building robust pipelines processing millions of rows to power influential analysis.
      • Delivered bespoke analyses supporting major media coverage (BBC, Politico).
      • Seamlessly migrated a critical external data source, boosting reliability and enabling novel analysis.

  2. UK Research and Innovation (formerly STFC)

    1. Platform Architect

      October 2022 to August 2023

      Led the delivery and operation of a scalable developer platform across three engineering teams.

      • Migrated 30 services to Kubernetes and introduced centralised logging, boosting scalability, observability, and deployment speed.
      • Strengthened platform security through proactive risk management.

    2. Engineering Team Lead

      January 2019 to October 2022

      Built and led a high-performing agile engineering team delivering critical web products to global users

      • Launched a new web platform used by 10,000+ users worldwide.
      • Cut project delivery costs by 30% through strategic partnerships.
      • Accelerated service delivery by embedding agile practices.

    3. (Graduate) Software Engineer

      August 2015 to January 2019

      Developed and maintained critical public-facing web services, extending CMS functionality, implementing GDPR-compliant changes, and improving production reliability.
      Promoted in August 2017 based on performance.

Technical skills

  • Orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker)
  • Clouds (OpenStack, AWS, Google Cloud)
  • Monitoring (Elastic/OpenSearch)
  • Web fundamentals (HTML, JS, CSS)
  • Frontend frameworks (React)
  • Version control (git)
  • Languages (Python, R, Java, Typescript, Bash)
  • Agile tools (GitHub, JIRA, Trello)
  • CI & CD (Jenkins, GitHub actions)
  • Testing (Unit, Integration, System, Acceptance)
  • LLM workflows (ChatGPT, VS Code Copilot)

Education

  1. Royal Holloway, University of London

    2012 to 2015
    First Class BSc Computer Science (Hons)

  2. West Kirby Grammar School

    2010 to 2012

  3. St Anselm's College

    2005 to 2010

Additional qualifications

  • Professional Member of the British Computer Society (MBCS)
  • APM Project Fundamentals
  • Certified SAFe 5 Agilist

Hobbies

Enjoys tech meetups (Remote Hack), building side projects (notably Tartan-ify), film photography, board games, coffee, pizza, and hiking.