Layton
Reynolds

Backend engineer. I build Go APIs handling 50M+ requests a day, and I learnt reliability first-hand in production support.

West Midlands, UK · in production engineering since 2023

Go · REST · GCP · Linux · Docker

Email me

dev@laytonreynolds.com

Experience

  1. – now

    Software Developer (volunteer)

    Chadwell Telecom

    • Built Chadbot, an extensible Python agent platform with shared data store, credentials and alerting. Its daily sales summariser validates every figure in code, withholds PII from the model, and reaches the CRM read-only.
    • Built a Go knowledge assistant for sales agents on retrieval-augmented generation. Confidence gates make it abstain and hand over to customer services, with an editorial review workflow and a 100-case evaluation suite run in CI.
    • Deployed both on a Docker Compose VPS with Entra ID sign-in (enforced MFA, role-based access), GitHub Actions deploys and Teams alerts when a service fails.

  2. – now

    Software Developer

    Global, highly regulated platform · backend, Go

    • Designed and built Go APIs for core services that together handle 50M+ requests a day at under 200 ms.
    • Worked on the migration of on-prem services to Google Cloud, cutting infrastructure overhead by up to 75% in some areas and shortening deployments.
    • Cut incident resolution from 1 hour to 20 minutes by monitoring and optimising on-prem and cloud services, while meeting reliability SLAs.
    • Ship React and TypeScript features on top of those Go APIs, plus small C#/.NET features and production fixes across an estate of hundreds of internal services.

  3. –

    Development Support Engineer

    Same platform, production support

    • Migrated 1,000+ production servers from CentOS 7 to RHEL 9 and Ubuntu, owning the build pipeline, configuration and rollout.
    • Automated infrastructure work in Python, Bash and Ansible to remove manual steps and make deployments consistent.
    • Led incident response on global-scale platforms, using root-cause analysis to stop repeats.
    • Brought new services into production, with the documentation and training to support them long term.

  4. –

    Systems Administrator

    Plan.com

    • Integrated internal systems over REST APIs, removing 3–5 hours of manual admin a week.
    • Built partner lead-capture forms and sites on the Salesforce API.
    • Set up a new office, onboarding 40+ users with Azure, Intune and Autopilot.

Projects

FC Tracker

Full-stack app for running a football team's season: fixtures, players, goals, assists and leaderboards. A Go API with JWT auth, leaderboards computed with MongoDB aggregation pipelines, and a React and TypeScript front end. Containerised with Docker and deployed through GitHub Actions.

Go · Gin · MongoDB · JWT · React · TypeScript · Docker

Selected FC Tracker API routes
Method Route
GET /health
POST /api/auth/login
GET /api/player/:id/fixtures
POST /api/fixture/addgoalscorer
GET /api/leaderboard/goals
GET /api/leaderboard/motm
6 of 25 routes. 22 sit behind JWT auth.

Everill’s Martial Arts & Fitness

Volunteer project: a site for a martial arts club in Telford, replacing their Wix site, plus a paid online video course. Stripe Checkout with signature-checked webhooks and idempotent enrolment, and a daily cron that reconciles Stripe against Postgres so no paid order goes unenrolled. Learners sign in by emailed link or 6-digit code, with only hashes of tokens stored. Lesson videos play through signed, expiring Bunny Stream URLs.

TypeScript · Next.js · PostgreSQL · Stripe · Resend · Vercel

Selected Everill’s API routes
Method Route
POST /api/checkout
POST /api/stripe/webhook
GET /api/cron/reconcile
POST /api/learn/sign-in
POST /api/learn/verify
POST /api/learn/progress
6 of 11 routes. Source is private, client work.

Chadbot KB

Internal knowledge assistant for a telecom company’s sales agents, plus a public static help centre. Customer enquiries are mined from the support mailbox through a redaction pipeline with a blocking human audit, then clustered into topics that become articles. Every published article is human-approved (draft, review, approve, publish, each its own Entra role). Answers come from hybrid retrieval: pgvector and Postgres full-text fused with RRF, then reranked. Six gates sit around the model, and anything it can’t ground becomes a handover ticket, never unvalidated text. A golden set of 100 questions runs in CI against a recorded baseline.

Go · chi · PostgreSQL · pgvector · Claude · Voyage · React · TypeScript · Docker · Caddy

Selected Chadbot KB assistant routes
Method Route
POST /admin/assistant/conversations
POST /admin/assistant/chat
POST /admin/assistant/handover/send
GET /admin/kb/search
POST /admin/articles/draft-from-gap
GET /admin/analytics/summary
6 selected routes. /chat streams server-sent events. Source is private, client work.

Chadbot

Platform for scheduled business agents on one VPS. Each agent is a Prefect flow that gathers data, calculates every figure in Python, has Claude write a little prose, and delivers the result. A validator rejects any number in Claude’s reply that isn’t in the computed figures, and the report still goes out figures-only if the model fails. The sales summariser reads a CRM through a read-only service user, checked at the start of every run, and keeps personal data away from the model. Shared encrypted credentials, a container watchdog, and a read-only FastAPI and React dashboard behind Microsoft sign-in. Direct debit failure recovery and customer outreach agents are in development.

Python · FastAPI · Prefect · PostgreSQL · Claude · React · Docker Compose · GitHub Actions

Product walkthrough · 25 sec Reviewing sales agent performance and reports. Use fullscreen for detail.
Selected Chadbot dashboard API routes
Method Route
GET /api/agents
GET /api/agents/{name}/series
GET /api/agents/{name}/breakdown
GET /api/agents/{name}/runs
GET /api/reports
GET /healthz
6 selected routes, all read-only. Source is private, client work.

Also built

Skills

Backend
Go, Java (Spring Boot), Python (Django), C# / .NET
APIs & services
REST, HTTP/JSON, API versioning, service-oriented architecture, inter-service integration
Cloud & infrastructure
Google Cloud Platform, Linux, Docker, Ansible
Data
PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Riak
Delivery
Git, GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing
Frontend
TypeScript, React, JavaScript

Education

  1. 2021

    Software Development bootcamp

    QA. Full-time, Level 4 aligned: Java, Python, MySQL, Spring Boot microservices, Azure (AZ-900).

  2. Online

    CS50: Introduction to Computer Science

    Harvard, via edX. Algorithms, data structures, security and web development in C, Python and SQL.

  3. 2016–2019

    BSc Strength & Conditioning

    University of Gloucestershire. Statistical data analysis in IBM SPSS.