Company: Barclays Bank
Website: https://www.barclays.co.uk/https://www.alfresco.com/
Period of work: 15 months

Barclays Now is the main intranet platform in the Barclays network.
Serving strongly diversified content to more than 180.000 employees, having a federated, centralized search solution has been key to the success of the project.

Sease has worked with Barclays with the focus of improving the search capabilities of the Barclays Now intranet platform.

// Activities Covered
Software Engineering
  • Design and development of a federated search solution across a number of diversified data sources
  • Refactor of the Search-API layer introducing unit and integration tests
  • Search relevancy tuning (field weighting, stemming and partial match)
  • Advanced search relevancy tuning (including personalisation of search results)
  • Advanced spellcheck design and configuration
  • Faceting design and implementation
  • Apache Solr upgrade analysis, design and roadmap proposal
  • SolrCloud live incidents troubleshooting and investigations
  • Design and development of the automated release process through all the environments
  • Supervise and coordinate the search team through all the processes
Agile
  • Mentor Agile ceremonies in a sprint based approach ( Backlog grooming, Sprint planning, Stand Up meeting, Sprint Retrospective) encouraging best practices and curating a productive Jira workflow
Business Analysis
  • Supervise the business analysis tasks with direct collaboration with Senior Stakeholders to gather requirements and elaborate appropriate solutions
// feedback
Alessandro is an extremely knowledgeable search developer, with a rare level of deep insights into the inner workings of Apache Lucene and Apache Solr. Furthermore, his passion and dedication is exemplary, attending meetups, taking time out of work to attend conferences, and working on open source contributions in his own time. It has been a pleasure working with him, and I would definitely hire Alessandro again if the opportunity arose.
Michael Lewis
Digital Architect Barclays