Valentin Roy

London, UK · (+44) 7585617286 · [email protected]

Experienced software engineer with a proven history of excelling in fast-paced, customer-focused roles. My expertise lies in high-performance computing (6 years experience overall) and high-throughput real-time and distributed systems (6 years experience overall)

Experience

Principal Software Engineer

Collins Aerospace

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I am part of a small engineering team working on OpsCore a fast-growing "cloud native" flight tracking system used by airline dispatchers. My primary focus has been the design and implementation of a new alerting engine to notify users of unexpected aircraft behavior and weather events.

The role is highly hands-on, with approximately 80% of my contributions in the backend using C# (and some Go + Python) within an event-driven, service-oriented architecture. The remainder of my time is split between infrastructure and deployment work (Terraform, Argo CD, Azure DevOps pipelines), light front-end work (TypeScript), and supporting other developers on the team, particularly junior engineers.

As principal, I drive early-stage technical discovery and solution design for new product features, working closely with the Head of Product and fellow senior engineers to clarify requirements, explore architectural approaches, identify edge cases and constraints, and develop proof of concepts before committing to implementation.

Led the design and development of a real-time alerting platform, migrating data ingestion from Redis Streams to Kafka to enable scalable processing of up to 20,000 aircraft in near real time.
Re-architected the alerting system for scalability and reliability, introducing support for live operational alerts including weather events, missing position reports, SQUAWK changes, route deviations, and diversions, significantly reducing SRE paging and improving operational signal quality.
Took ownership of Site Reliability Engineering and platform engineering responsibilities following the departure of the dedicated SRE function, managing:
- Terraform-based infrastructure provisioning and secrets management
- Kubernetes cluster administration and deployment automation
- Production release coordination and rollout management
- CloudWatch log aggregation and operational monitoring
- Incident investigation and production support
Enhanced the security posture of cloud-hosted applications by implementing Okta MFA/SSO, API authentication controls, Cloudflare WAF policies, and rate-limiting mechanisms to protect against unauthorized access, abuse, and common web-based attacks.
Active contributor in a remote, US-based team, mentoring junior engineers and collaborating closely with QA, SREs, and managers.

September 2024 - Present

Senior Software Engineer

McLaren Applied Technologies Ltd. (now Motion Applied Ltd.)

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Role Overview

I was responsible for the deployment of real-time telemetry software tools and infrastructure for Formula 1 teams. I worked closely with users and product owners to clarify needs, capture and manage requirements, test and verify solutions, and support customers during product adoption.

Over the 6 years I spent there, my responsibilities covered software engineering, infrastructure, and extensive track-side support.

Hands-on Software Engineering

Part of a 2-person team designing a real-time data streaming protocol from on-car control units to F1 team garages. This work was central in securing the FIA 2026 SECU4 contract, guaranteeing revenue until 2030.
Tech stack: C#, Kafka, Protobuf, gRPC, Redis.
Achieved sustained throughput of ~10,000 messages per second with ~20ms latency on constrained bandwidth networks.
Feature development and bug fixing on ATLAS, our core telemetry acquisition product. Focused primarily on backend components such as data recorders and the data access layer (SQLRace, an in-house time-series database).
Regular on-call support during race weekends to resolve customer issues and fix critical production bugs.
Languages: ~50% C++ / ~50% C#.
Development of in-house Python tools used track-side for data analytics in the Formula-E championship, primarily focused on battery usage tracking.
Application development on McLaren ECUs using MATLAB/Simulink and the McLaren Control Toolbox, involving writing and deploying embedded software.

Infrastructure & DevOps

Promoted and helped establish a DevOps culture at McLaren, evolving from ad-hoc laptop-based build systems to a full CI/CD setup using on-prem Azure agent pools.
Designed and implemented a framework to automate UI testing, significantly reducing time spent on repetitive manual smoke tests.
Containerized the majority of internal services and used Terraform to standardize and streamline deployments.

Track-Side & Customer-Facing Work

Track Support Engineer for seasons 7 and 8 of the FIA Formula-E Championship.
Supported Formula 1 customers during pre-season testing, tyre testing sessions, and selected Grand Prix events.
Onboarded and trained new engineers, helping them understand the tech stack and the broader telemetry ecosystem.
Delivered hands-on training sessions at customer sites (including Mercedes, Mahindra, Audi, and Toyota), primarily focused on developer-facing APIs.

July 2018 - September 2024

Contractor

Civil Aviation Authority

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I developed and maintained production software for aircraft noise exposure calculation around UK civil airports as part of the Aircraft Noise Contour Model (ANCON).

Rewrote core components of the model from FORTRAN to modern C++, breaking down a large monolithic codebase into more maintainable components.
Designed and implemented a revamped simulation engine in C++ capable of running on distributed-memory architectures, using MPI to parallelize computation across multiple nodes.
Implemented data access layers using SQL, Entity Framework, and REST APIs in .NET, including the necessary interop layer between managed and unmanaged code.
Conducted extensive testing throughout development and validated results against existing aviation environmental modelling tools.
Authored comprehensive system and design documentation to support long-term maintenance and knowledge transfer.

June 2016 - June 2018

Junior Software Engineer

Advanced Design Technology Ltd.

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I helped develop numerical methods for advanced computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software, primarily in C++ with some FORTRAN. The team specialized in aerodynamic design of turbomachinery components.

Successfully led and delivered consultancy projects in aero- and hydrodynamic design, contributing directly to new customer acquisition.
Worked closely with high-profile customers, including the Renault Formula 1 team, to develop an innovative performance prediction tool for turbocharger design.
Designed and implemented a user-friendly graphical interface for one of the tools in the software suite using C++ and the Qt framework.

July 2013 - June 2016