Rich Dougherty
Full Stack Engineer at Westpac New Zealand
Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRich Dougherty is an experienced Full Stack Engineer with 18 years building resilient, high-performance systems in Scala, Kotlin, Java, Python and JavaScript, currently based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has led engineering and principal roles across major banks and critical infrastructure organisations, driving cloud-native modernisation, Kubernetes migrations and microservices architectures. A long-time open-source contributor at Lightbend, his commits to flagship projects like Akka and Play framework show deep expertise in concurrency, networking and template/serialization internals. Rich blends hands-on backend engineering with platform-level thinking—improving test infrastructure, dependency management and secure gRPC/SSL configurations—so teams ship reliably at scale. Notably, his work on TechEmpower benchmarks and Play/Slick integration demonstrates a practical focus on performance and upgradeability that benefits both product and developer experience.
17 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
BSc (Computer Science) BCA (Economics), BSc (Computer Science) BCA (Economics) at Victoria University of Wellington
Stackoverflow
3,251reputation
160kreached
87answers
0questions
sbt
top-5%
scala
top-5%
playframework
top-5%
Github Skills (36)
benchmark10
frameworkbenchmarks10
ssl10
back-end-development10
database-access10
testing10
http10
sbt10
benchmarking10
data-serialization10
templater10
template-engine10
akka10
java10
akka-http10
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
playframework/play-slick
May 2014 - Aug 2017
Slick Plugin for Play
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:41 commits, 10 PRs, 9 pushes in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Rich primarily contributed to improving the test infrastructure and codebase of the Play-Slick plugin. They fixed a database driver registration issue to resolve test failures, ensuring proper functionality in the testing environment. They also addressed reflection errors related to class loading when upgrading the Play framework. Furthermore, the user updated the project dependencies and build configurations to incorporate newer versions of Play, Slick, and related tooling.
database-accessplay-frameworksbt-pluginplayframeworkplugin
playframework/playframework
Mar 2013 - Sep 2018
The Community Maintained High Velocity Web Framework For Java and Scala.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:564 commits, 338 PRs, 190 pushes in 5 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Rich contributed to the Play Framework's core by implementing and optimizing Java-related features. Their work included addressing thread safety issues when reloading applications and modifying the handling of incoming HTTP requests and responses. They also made improvements to the framework's internal mechanisms for working with cookies, and fixed some integration tests to accommodate new features and ensure robust performance.
restfulplay-frameworkframeworkplayframeworkjvm
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