Phil Nicholls

About

I'm a senior Python/Django engineer with 20+ years in software, the last 5+ fully remote. I own systems end to end: architecture, PostGIS performance, Linux operations, deployment and observability.

I work AI-first, using Claude Code with custom per-app skills to standardise deployments and speed up review, and I ship applied AI such as a computer-vision service that identifies species in camera-trap images.

Open to long-term, fully remote contracts with one client. Based in Ubud, Bali (UTC+8).

Selected work

Wildlife early-warning platform

Israel Nature and Parks Authority

• 1,282 actively tagged birds
• 118.8 million location records, about 56,600 more a day
• About 3 minutes from GPS fix to ranger alert

I inherited an outdated prototype and rebuilt it as a horizontally scalable pipeline on Celery, RabbitMQ and PostGIS. Twelve telemetry files arrive every minute; each fix becomes metrics, behavioural states and events such as suspected mortality, suspected poisoning, immobility, wind-farm entry and low battery. Alerts go to regional and species ranger groups on Telegram. A scenario test suite replays real captured telemetry and catches performance regressions before release. Rangers have used the alerts to save birds, some more than once, and Italy's national environmental institute, ISPRA, now runs its own birds through it.

Computer vision for camera traps

Israel Nature and Parks Authority

A gRPC inference service, secured with mutual TLS, that runs the MegaDetector model on camera-trap images with species classification and people detection, cutting manual image review for field staff.

Rules and automation engine

Israel Nature and Parks Authority

A configurable rules engine for the Authority's core observation and enforcement platform, a Django monolith of about 130 apps. Nested condition groups with lazy evaluation and caching, time-based rules, reversible actions and Celery execution let staff automate workflows without code changes.

Planning and permits platform

Israel Nature and Parks Authority

Tracks development plans and permit applications against protected land: integrates with the national permit-licensing API, ingests Office 365 email, extracts geometry from DWG/DXF and shapefiles, and measures development encroachment into ecological corridors.

15x faster overnight data transfer

Israel Nature and Parks Authority

Re-engineered a data-transfer API as a streaming pipeline, cutting its runtime from up to 5 hours to 20 minutes.

Projects

Guru Shishya

gurushishya.philjnicholls.com

A practice partner for Indian classical music. Students hear a short phrase and play or sing it back, and are scored on notes, order and timing, working through raga-based lessons from first steps to alap and meend. A personal project, designed and built end to end.

Experience

1. May 2021 – present

   Israel Nature and Parks Authority

   Lead Backend & GIS Engineer (contract, fully remote)

   Lead engineer in a four-developer team running eight production Django/PostGIS systems: wildlife telemetry, the national field-observation and enforcement platform, planning permits, veterinary lab results and public portals. About 5,000 commits since 2021.

   • Integrated NASA VIIRS and MODIS fire detections, matched against burn permits, nature reserves and waste sites.
   • Built predictive Prometheus/Grafana alerting (queue depth, backup age, forecast days until disks fill) plus Sentry.
   • Remediated penetration-test findings and added mutual-TLS service authentication, ClamAV upload scanning and encryption at rest.
   • Migrated apps to Django 5 and Python 3.12, squashed migrations across 84 apps and moved deployments to Ansible.
   • Maintain the shared library every NPA app depends on, and designed lab-based technical interviews for hiring.

2. Aug 2015 – May 2021

   Freelance

   Senior Python & Backend Developer

   • Designed and deployed gRPC microservices for distributed data processing.
   • Built scraping and automated marketing-arbitrage engines that analysed high-volume web data in real time.

3. Jun 2012 – Aug 2015

   Semantico, UK

   Technical Project Manager

   • Led Agile teams delivering publishing platforms for UK and US clients, with budgets of $100k–$1M.
   • Launched the first ORCID author-identification integration in academic publishing.
   • Delivered OnePetro.org, indexing 145,000 journals into Solr.

4. May 2008 – Jun 2012

   CWT Digital, UK

   Web Developer & Technical Project Manager

   • Built a white-label cruise-booking framework that cut client onboarding from weeks to days.

5. Oct 2004 – May 2008

   Eversheds LLP, UK

   Analyst Programmer & Business Analyst

   • Built ETL moving hundreds of millions of records, and migration tooling for 5,000+ staff.

6. Oct 2000 – Oct 2003

   ComponentSource, UK

   Lead Analyst Programmer

   • Lead developer on component-reuse products; XML and SOAP B2B interfaces.

Skills

Backend

Python, Django, GeoDjango, Celery, RabbitMQ, REST APIs, gRPC, streaming pipelines

Data and GIS

PostgreSQL, PostGIS, spatial query optimisation, geometry cleaning, GPS and accelerometer telemetry, geofencing

Applied AI

computer vision, MegaDetector, AI-assisted engineering with Claude Code

Operations

Ubuntu, Ansible, Nginx, zero-downtime deployment, Prometheus, Grafana, Sentry, security hardening

Leadership

architecture decisions, technical hiring, stakeholder communication, PRINCE2

Education and certifications

• freeCodeCamp certifications Scientific Computing with Python; JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures; Front End Libraries; Responsive Web Design, 2020
• PRINCE2 Practitioner Axelos, 2015
• Business Analysis Essentials; Requirements Engineering ISEB, 2007
• Information Technology, Psychology and Sociology St. Vincent College, 1999