Gemma Harrison

Experience

• 

  Metaswitch Networks

  Sept 1997 - Feb 2021

  Engineering manager in the telephony business unit responsible for 15 engineers covering development and testing across a suite of products. Responsible for ensuring that projects provided value for customers, and delivered on time and to budget. • Created plans for complex engineering projects spanning in house teams and 3rd party suppliers; project managed these projects to successful completion.• Defined quality and testing required for a new mobile app and associated backend servers, put in place cross-team test strategy and Jira based bug tracking processes and recruited and trained testers to carry out the testing.• Developed new engineering managers and key IC talent to enable the continued growth of the team. Show less Engineering manager for teams of 3-6 engineers developing and testing large scale, redundant, distributed telecoms products.• Managed testing across Perimeta SBC and softswitch products. Delivered high-quality on >50 features, including finding creative ways to test performance across 20+ SBC setups, spanning OpenStack, VMware and dedicated hardware.• Led a development team implementing numerous softswitch features, including re-architecting a product to reduce software fault recovery time from 30 seconds to 3 seconds. • Led a team defining and building a new diagnostics service to allow telecoms operators to view all call flows and find problems in their network. This diagnostics service was invaluable to customers and support, and was leveraged across the full suite of Metaswitch products. • Hired, onboarded, and developed the next generation of graduate software engineers. Show less

  • Senior Software Engineering Manager

    Aug 2016 - Feb 2021

  • Software Engineering Manager

    Jan 2007 - Jul 2016

  • Customer Support Manager

    Sept 2003 - Dec 2006

  • Software Engineer / Engineering Manager

    Sept 1997 - Aug 2003
• 

  Microsoft

  Mar 2021 - Oct 2024

  Principal Software Engineering Manager

  Built and led 20-30 people teams focusing on Telecoms products running in Azure, within Microsoft's Strategic Missions and Technologies division. Within a year created a persuasive business case for a new product, assembled a strong, thriving team, and built the product.Found creative ways to reduce the maintenance required on legacy products, freeing up 16 people to work on new products. Played an active role in the senior leadership team for a 350-strong engineering team. Mentored multiple women across the organisation. Show less

• 

  Lindus Health

  Jan 2025 - now

  Director of Engineering