Alexander Collins

April 2024 - Current

OneTrust Contractor

At the end of 2023, ex-colleagues from OneTrust got back in contact with me with an opportunity I couldn't say no to. They asked me to fix & finish the Android scanner I worked on initially and build an iOS decompilation app engine.

• 4-5 months identifying and fixing issues with the android scanning engine, both the backend and frontend. I was the only developer on the team at this point and had to re-adapt to OneTrusts ecosystem.
• During this time I was also researching how we can build an iOS decompilation engine and build a product that would provide feature-parity with the Android offering.
• Learnt to scope work for OneTrust's strict sprint-to-sprint agile-style of management.
• The next 4-5 months (likely longer) are going to be building the iOS engine.

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May 2023 - April 2024

Solagen Embedded Software Engineer

The company software/firmware developer, responsible for: maintaining 10+ year old embedded firmware for real-time systems for traffic safety signs, a fullstack IoT system for remotely controlling signs, an Android App used for commissioning signs, the company's custom CRM and more. Solagen operated thousands of road safety signs across the UK and Australia.

• Developed C firmware for a 4G modem, that would provide networking for all Solagen signs. This was replacing an add-on module in the real-time system that ran the signs and had to work smoothly.
• Established mobile data connections (3GPP - LTE with UTRAN & GPRS fallback) and SMS for sign-to-sign comms.
• Salvaged the company CRM / sign management portal, which was a very unreliable 15+ year old PHP behemoth, SQL database and Java service which had survived a poorly-handled migration.
  • Added Docker support, provided DB backups, migrated SMTP to Sendgrid, fixed DNS issues and more.
• Updated and fixed the company Android application to work on modern Android devices.

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November 2017 - August 2022

AppSecTest & OneTrust Acquisition Full-Stack Software Engineer

Analysis of third-party data collection behaviours. One of two developers for 4-5 years in a 5-man startup. We created a decompilation engine, which analysed Android apps (APKs) for security, legal and privacy compliance issues.

• One of the two developers of the core static analysis engine.
• A key decision maker driving the direction of the product. Transparent communication was key to this.
• Worked on tight deadlines (and budgets). This taught me the impact, cost and value of my time, quick & assertive decision making was paramount to this.
• Refactored the runtime to enable cloud deployments, developing a network layer. This was key to our success.
• Fullstack development of a webapp to serve as a sales pitch for the data collected by our engine. This was used for the pitch to our acquisition. Built multiple systems to showcase value in our data, such as generating deltas between app versions.
• I started working for the company during my final student year and still achieved a First-Class Honours.

In May 2022, we successfully made an exit by selling the technology & team to OneTrust. We integrated AppSecTests technology as a 'OneTrust cloud' SaaS. This required learning their ecosystem (Kafka, Azure, Spring, Angular) and delivering within 5 months.

• Refactored our Android App decompilation & analysis engine as a SaaS using SpringBoot, Kafka, Azure.
• Identified the core value of AppSecTest's technology (archiving the rest).
• Proactively looked for different OneTrust offerings our product could integrate with and provide value to.
• Provided immediate value to the service by developing a system to translate analysis results into a 'Google Play Data Safety' document, which users could use to submit their apps for Play Store approval.

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July 2016 - August 2017

Intel Technical Marketing Engineer

A 14-month internship in the Internet of Things (IoT) team.

• Led a project researching & showcasing LoRa(WAN). This research went on to form my dissertation.
• Managed & trained successor intern for 2 months and was able to teach them a lot in a short space of time.
• Given sole responsibility for the IoT RFID demo in Intel's front-door booth at 2017 HPE Discover London
• Learnt & developed fullstack IoT solutions: MCUs & SoC's, data science, backend, frontend.
• Educated groups of children, academics and communicated Intel's value-add to leaders in both the London and Swindon Intel offices.

2014 - 2018

University of the West of England (UWE) BSc (Hons), Computer Science

A 4-year sandwich course (includes a year of internship). Achieved a First-Class Honours.

• Awarded the Dean Award for Academic Excellence in my first and final years. For achieving an overall average mark of 75%+ across all modules.
• Final year dissertation produced a LoRaWAN C library and extensible C++ framework to write drivers for seeedstudio Grove sensor devices in a couple of lines. This was demonstrated on a custom ARM board.
  • Research on the LoRa technology went down to the PHY layer, I really enjoyed this research.
• Developed a RFC4330-compliant SNTP server & client when learning TCP/IP in a networking & OS course.
• Designed a single-wire communication protocol and implemented it on a BBC microbit MCU.
• Learning & developing a genetic (natural selection) algorithm to find data patterns.