Gerard Downes
Software Development Contractor - Technical Architect Full Stack Engineer at LoweConex
Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolGerard Downes is a versatile Technical Architect and software development contractor with 11 years of experience crafting cloud-native, distributed systems and SaaS products from concept to production. He is a polyglot engineer comfortable across Java, Kotlin, Scala, Clojure, C#, JavaScript/TypeScript and Node.js, who has delivered high-throughput telemetry pipelines, identity platforms, payments infrastructure and serverless document engines. Gerard combines hands-on implementation (including contributions to the New Relic Java agent) with team leadership—leading replatformings to AWS/Azure, founding and shipping multiple SaaS businesses, and directing frontend redesigns for cohesive product experiences. He specialises in clean architecture, domain-driven design and resilient event-driven systems, and has built systems processing tens of millions of events per day using Kubernetes, Spring Boot, React and modern CI/CD. Comfortable bridging product, commercial and technical concerns, he pairs engineering depth with pragmatic delivery and go-to-market experience. Based in Belfast, he regularly turns complex legacy challenges into scalable, maintainable platforms while maintaining an appetite for low-level runtime and instrumentation work.
11 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Higher National Diploma (HND), Multimedia, Higher National Diploma (HND), Multimedia at Belfast Metropolitan CollegeBachelor of Engineering (BEng), Computer Science, Bachelor of Engineering (BEng), Computer Science at Ulster University
Stackoverflow
643reputation
58kreached
6answers
11questions
Github Skills (18)
annotations10
instrumentation10
java10
annotation-processing10
javas10
expressions9
testing9
lambdas9
expression9
lambda9
maven6
eclipse6
javabeans6
gwt6
apache-camel6
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
newrelic/newrelic-java-agent
Apr 2021 - Jul 2022
The New Relic Java agent
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:14 reviews, 105 commits, 60 PRs in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Gerard primarily focused on enhancing the New Relic Java agent by introducing new features related to tracing lambda methods. They implemented a new class annotation, `LambdaTrace`, and modified the instrumentation logic to trace all lambda methods within a class. The changes included adding a visitor to detect the annotation and a method visitor to add trace details. Additionally, the user refactored the existing `TraceLambda` annotation to include annotation configuration and testing.
newrelicagentjsinteropsecurityjava-agent
gitboard-io/gitboard-action
Jan 2023 - Oct 2023
Contributions:30 releases, 2 PRs, 79 pushes in 9 months
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