Luke Manson
Senior Golang Engineer
GB
Backend software engineer with over 10 years of experience in building web apps and APIs.
About
With over 10 years of experience in technology leadership and software engineering across diverse industries, I have played key roles in developing and refining advanced systems, contributing significantly to business growth and technological innovation.
https://gitlab.com/JankTech https://linkedin.com/in/lukemanson https://luke.manson.io
Experience
Senior Golang Engineer
Led a team of 6 engineers through the launch of a new fintech platform.
- Refactored the mono repo's error package to remove 3rd party dependencies.
- Led a project from plan to release that redesigned the platform's core payment system, allowing auto detection and handling of bounced / failed payments.
Senior Golang Engineer
Facilitated the dev team's transition to Go by offering guidance and mentorship in the language.
- Established a documented standard of Golang best practices for the company.
- Redesigned and implemented a new logging strategy for SparkLayer's distributed Golang services, utilizing structured logging and standardised error reporting.
- Mentored three interns, fostering new talent in software engineering.
- Refactored critical features from an outdated PHP monolith to a scalable Golang microservice, managing over 1 million requests daily.
Lead Web Developer
Led the web development team through an accelerated growth period, scaling the team from 3 to 30 employees and the company from 10 to 86 employees.
- Played a pivotal role in scaling the company's system and team, managing backend development, overseeing technical project planning, ensuring timely project delivery, and mentoring developers.
- Refactored significant technical debt, leading to a £2m SaaS product sale and underpinning a £7m investment deal.
- Led the data services team to overhaul Zapmap's data ingestion system, increasing events processed from a few thousand a day to 1 million per day, while reducing server load by 60%.
- Developed a multi-tenant payment processing system that transformed the UK's electric vehicle charging market, enabling unified payment across multiple operators.
- Reengineered a legacy API into a suite of microservices, forming Zapmap's modern codebase backbone, enhancing company partnerships and maintaining a competitive edge.
Volunteer Tester
Improved 3D-printed bionic arm prosthetics through rigorous testing and feedback.
- First user of 'The Hero Arm' (2017) and the 'RGD' arm (2025) outside of the Open Bionics lab.
- Tested prototype of The Hero Arm, providing feedback on features, safety, and design improvements, many of which were incorporated into the final release.
Full Stack Software Engineer
Played a key role in driving web development and cybersecurity initiatives at an innovative web agency.
Personal Projects
Web tools and systems for electric car charging, based on the OCPI protocol.
- Implemented key OCPI features.
- Developed an OCPI validator for public use.
Maps market stalls and mobile food vendors, available on the Android app store.
- Successfully launched on Android app store.
- Automated app build and deployment pipelines.
CMS/Blog framework
A web framework/cms system for building blogs and content sites.
- WIP - Intended for use as a wine tasting notes website with plans to make generic in the future.
Pet Profile
A collar-linked QR code application for displaying pet information.
- Successfully launched product with active users.
- Templ Icons: A Go package templ wrapper for Tailwind's heroicons.
- UUID: A Go package enhancing Google's UUID library with convenience functions.
- Null: A Golang package implementing JSON compatible null values.
- Enum: A Golang implementation of an enums package.