Jeff Foster

Jeff Foster is the current head of product engineering at Redgate Software. Jeff has over fifteen years of experience in the software industry, with a focus on software engineering and product management. Jeff has a passion for developing software that is both robust and scalable.

Jeff started their career as a software engineer at Autonomy, where they were instrumental in the development of a C++ code-generation layer. This led to the development of a simple framework for Autonomy products, drastically reducing the amount of time it took to develop new applications. Jeff also dramatically improved the performance of the document ingestion process by using a simple stateless multi-threaded architecture. The solution scaled well both with the number of threads and the number of machines and provided an order of magnitude improvement over the original implementation.

When given the opportunity to manage the software team for a large SaaS project, Jeff introduced an agile development process to the team, and over a period of a few months they greatly improved the quality and resilience of the service. For testing web services, Jeff developed a custom fuzz-testing tool in Java that generated syntactically valid queries under various amounts of load. To test Autonomy's core product, Jeff built a model using Haskell and generated test cases using QuickCheck. This generated thousands of automated queries with known answers and was used to verify the low-level C/C++ code (and found a few bugs in the process).

After eleven years at Autonomy, Jeff joined Redgate Software as head of product engineering. In this role, they are responsible for overseeing the development of Redgate's products, ensuring that they are of the highest quality and meet customer needs.Jeff is passionate about their work and is always looking for ways to improve the products and processes at Redgate.

Jeff Foster reports to Mark Cheverton, CTO. They are on a team with Matthew Godfrey - Head of Product Design, Chris Smith - Head of Product Delivery, and David Atkinson - Head of Product Strategy.