Sit down with Richard Sanderson-Pope, Principal Engineer

When Richard joined Codat a little over two years ago, we were a team of 40. Now a 200+ strong team across numerous geographies, Richard has played a huge part in the growth of the business and our technology. He’s now a Principal Engineer, responsible for helping our Integrations team build brilliant products that our clients love. He recently sat down with us to talk about his experience in our Engineering team.

If you are interested in learning more about the opportunities in the Engineering team or other open roles at Codat, please visit our Careers page.

You’re a Principal Engineer for our Integrations team. Tell us a bit about your role?

As a Principal Engineer in the Integrations Platform team, my objective is to increase the performance of all of the teams writing and maintaining integrations.

Really my role is split three ways. Firstly, I’m writing and maintaining libraries which our teams rely on to provide all of the core functionality for their services. Secondly, I’m available as a point of support when one of our Engineers is getting stuck and they can’t solve a problem. I’m available to pair with them and help them solve the problem they’re facing. Lastly, I work with the Integrations Working Group and other stakeholders within Codat to guide all of our integrations to new technologies and practices which will help us achieve the company’s goals faster or better.

How does this differ from a typical developer role?

Most Developers will be working on a few integrations, adding features and quashing bugs within those services. I spend very little time working on product features in the integrations themselves and focus instead on how to make implementing those features easier for our teams.

What made you choose this role with Codat? 

I’ve always been more interested in developing libraries and working with Developer stakeholders. Whilst I was a Developer within our Silverstripe team, developing our Sage 50 and QuickBooks Desktop integrations, I started spending more and more time working on our shared packages, within integrations and across the Engineering team. When an opportunity to focus more on that came up, I jumped at it.

What tech stack does the Engineering team at Codat use, and why?

Codat primarily uses ASP.NET Core in C# and hosts its services in Azure using Azure App Service, and Azure Functions. Recently, we’ve been adding F# (Farmer) and terraform for infrastructure description. We also have front ends written primarily in React (Typescript) also hosted in Azure.

Tell us about some exciting projects you have coming up?

We’re currently working on a project to redesign how our services are hosted to massively increase the security of our deployed services. This is getting me deep into Azure networking options. There’s also a project we’re in the very early stages of which will redesign how we obtain and map data from the platforms we integrate with.

When you’re not working, what do you like to do with your time? (Netflix recommendations welcome here)

Recently, I’ve been spending most of my time working on some home renovation projects: fitting and decorating a new kitchen and utility room and I’m hoping to start kitting out my garage as a proper workshop soon.

We’re always on the lookout for brilliant people to join us and the Engineering team is no exception. If you’re excited by what we’re building, you can explore our open roles on our Careers page or reach out to the People team with any questions.