Helen Robinson

S

Senior Backend Engineer at ASOS · API platforms · rate limiting, PostgreSQL

ASOS
Oxford, UK · GMT (UTC+0)
8+ years experience
London School of Economics
English
Learning
Messaging unavailable

Overview

Based in Oxford. I work on API platforms at ASOS. Mentored 5 engineers through their first promotion. Moved 81% of public API traffic off a legacy monolith without a customer-facing incident.

Good reasons to reach out
  • Mentors who have done this before
  • Thoughtful intros to people in my field
  • Working sessions on rate limiting
  • Speaking or podcast invitations
Please don't message about
  • Unpaid work or spec projects
  • Agency or outsourcing pitches
  • Requests to fix your code for free
Skills
Djangorate limitingPostgreSQLSQLRedis
LearningLearning something
closes in 3 months

Learning Django - want a mentor for monthly reviews

Goal
Move from individual contributor to leading a small public API team.
Where I am now
Beginner
Ideal mentor
Someone who has worked in API platforms for a few years
Cadence
Monthly
What I can offer back
Testing and feedback on your projects

8 years in so far. Looking for honest feedback, once or twice a month.

Oxford, UKrate limitingpostgresqldjango
Open

Experience

  1. Senior Backend Engineer
    Jun 2025 - Present
    ASOS · 1 yr 4 mo · Full-time · Oxford, UK
    • Built the experimentation framework 35 product teams use to ship changes safely.
    • Shipped 16 launches on the public API team without a rollback.
    • Grew the public API team from 5 to 18 engineers.
  2. Backend Engineer
    Aug 2022 - Jun 2025
    Ocado · 2 yr 10 mo · Full-time · Oxford, UK
    • Cut p99 latency on the public API services from 650ms to 149ms.
    • Shipped a rewrite that took build times from 15 minutes to under 2.
  3. Backend Engineer
    Jun 2020 - Aug 2022
    BBC · 2 yr 2 mo · Full-time · Oxford, UK
    • Brought on-call pages for public API down from 23 a week to 2.
  4. Backend Engineer
    Dec 2018 - Apr 2020
    Morgan Stanley · 1 yr 4 mo · Full-time · Oxford, UK
    • Moved 86% of public API traffic off a legacy monolith without a customer-facing incident.
    • Brought on-call pages for public API down from 39 a week to 2.

References

No references yet.

Education

  1. London School of Economics
    BSc, Computer Science
    2014 - 2017

Details

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