Laura Hughes

Laura joined Softwire in 2014, with a degree in Theoretical Physics and a PhD in Theoretical Cosmology, both obtained at Imperial College London. She is a senior consultant with extensive experience in C#, Java, Ruby and JavaScript, and experience developing solutions in both Azure and AWS.​  Laura has worked as a technical consultant across the media and insurance sectors, for clients such as RSA, the BBC and Channel 5.

In-depth experience​

RSA Group – Senior Technical Lead​

Softwire is working with RSA to develop new customer-facing journeys for their extensive portfolio of insurance products. Laura headed the Motor Insurance API workstream from the outset, gathering information on RSA’s systems of record and other on-premise systems. Laura’s team delivered a new application that provides a clean API for the new website, eliminating many of the bugs and corner cases that existed in the on-premise systems. A focus on excellent testing practices, code quality and auditability meant that new functionality can be built and deployed rapidly, and Laura also headed the team that delivered RSA’s first major upgrade to the Motor Insurance journey after its initial launch.​

Channel 5 – Technical Delivery Lead​

For two years, Laura managed the ongoing development of two Ruby on Rails projects for Channel 5. the programmes database and the content acquisition service. These power Channel 5’s content for consumption by smart appliances such as TVs and Apps. Laura was also involved in the migration of these services to AWS as part of the overall Viacom strategy, including a major database restructuring and the expansion of Channel 5’s catalogue search capabilities using Elasticsearch.​

Association of British Insurers – Developer​

Laura led the front-end development on a new cloud system to enable data collection templates for insurance industry statistical reporting. The system is built in Azure, using Azure Message Bus and an elastic worker pool to achieve high scalability during periods of peak demand.​

Other experience – Tech Lead for BBC Mobile App, PHE TB Tracking system; Technical Consultant at S-Craft, Rush​

Laura has a great track record of successful project deliveries. Her enthusiasm and willingness to get involved shines through, particularly on engagements that need us to track down and agree on requirements across wide groups of stakeholders.