Career Profile
I’m an experienced technology leader, with a background in hands on engineering and a broad experience of technologies and platforms on premise and in the cloud. I’ve built high performance, high throughput SaaS platforms and scaled them globally, handling over 100 million daily transactions for well-known brands in the UK and US.
To do this, I’ve recruited, coached, mentored and retained teams of top notch engineers both locally and remotely. I’m immensely proud of building and fostering a culture of motivation, communication, happiness and respect across engineering organisations and I’ve lead significant change.
I’m a first-class communicator. I’m proactive, a problem-solver, and above all, a people person.
Employment history
Responsible for technology, delivery and engineers across the Current Account program, building a best in class current account to tight deadlines and rigorous governance standards.
Challenges: Building and maintaining an exceptional engineering culture with a laser focus on delivery and quality, from an engineering and governance perspective.
Platform: JVM and event driven architecture
ShowCode is a tech community platform where engineers can share, learn, compete and get hired.
I’m running the product and engineering team, building out our community platform and automated technical challenge framework.
Challenges: Implementing solid engineering practices, effective CI / CD pipelines and agile processes to deliver updates frequently and in line with a realistic road map. Reducing technical debt on complicated legacy platforms and managing remote engineering teams.
Platform: Azure (Kubernetes, App Services), .Net APIs, React UIs, MongoDB data infrastructure
As CTO at ctrlio I recruited and fostered an exceptional team of data scientists and engineers, building a platform on novel market and insurer data to give Insurer and broker clients in the motor insurance industry the most comprehensive view yet of how to price for profitable growth.
I’ve driven the platform from its genesis and research to a scale-able, revenue generating, 1st class real time market pricing platform.
Due to our small size I’ve also taken on COO duties looking after the budget, payroll and all areas of company operation and security compliance.
Challenges: Delivering robust platforms based on complex pricing mechanics, managing board expectations, steering the team through the pandemic, team management and culture building, establishing revenue generation, maintaining exceptional engineering standards, whilst moving fast.
Platform: AWS (Kubernetes, Docker, Glue, Athena, S3, Lambda, Kinesis, ES), Python modeling and analytics in real time and batch, SOA architecture. CI pipelines in Gitlab.
Returning temporarily to VoiceNotes, I refreshed the technical platform, took the company through ISO27001 certification single handed (4 successful audits) by implementing a mature information security management system and redefined operations to better address the finance industries needs with the advent of GDPR and MiFID II.
Challenges: Sales, ISO27001 compliance
Upon the acquisition of TagMan by Ensighten I continued to lead our UK based teams, supporting our Infrastructure, products and clients, whilst working closely with our product and technical teams around the world, to integrate TagMan platform features into the Ensighten suite. Pivotal in fostering UK / US communications and best practices I was heavily involved with engineering projects outside of the UK remit.
Moving up to VP of Engineering, I was responsible for the oversight, technical direction, and discipline of a globally distributed team of over 80 engineers. I led wholesales changes to the way we employed agile development, our communication practices, and tool-chains, allowing us to address technical debt on both core platforms and new products.
Changing the way that engineering teams worked with product allowed us to build confidence in delivery with the rest of the business. Constantly focused on employee satisfaction and the creation and maintenance of a great culture, I was able to attract and retain exceptional talent.
Challenges: Operationally handling multiple company acquisitions, large globally distributed teams, delivering multiple products in a fast moving environment and engineering real change in terms of quality, knowledge sharing and culture.
Platforms: AWS, Azure, GCP, Java, Python, Cassandra, Hadoop
As the first hire my responsibilities included the architecture and design of our platform, from sourcing, installation and networking of hardware in data centers, to the authoring and testing of production code for both high transaction environments and administrative user interfaces. I was responsible for its 24/7/365 operation.
As our client base expanded, I recruited a systems administration team to manage our infrastructure so my role could focus on the continued development of our software. I led the adoption of Agile frameworks and implemented close controls to ensure that it delivered real business benefit.
My tenure as Head of Development culminated with the release of a completely new platform built from the ground up in response to competitor products and client feedback.
Moving to global Head of Technical Services, my role was to move closer to our clients and ensure that our software was implemented correctly and our support services team were trained to high standards in its operation and troubleshooting. I led a team of implementation engineers in the UK, a team in the US, a support team in the UK and an outsourced QA and migration team.
I then took on, in addition, the direction of our Technical Operations team, directing the development of our infrastructure to support new features, faster response times and larger volumes of traffic, whilst adhering to a very strict SLA.
We were then acquired by Ensighten.
Challenges: Building a platform from scratch, hardware installation, software development of front and back ends and managing extreme company growth, both headcount-wise and technically.
Platforms: On-prem, Rackspace cloud, Softlayer cloud, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, CDNs
Responsible for designing, coding and implementing the supporting infrastructure for VoiceNotes, a platform that allows professionals to capture critical information in minutes using any phone which is converted to text, proof read to editorial standard and emailed to their team or CRM system as specified.
Challenges: Security, platform design and coding
Platforms: .NET
As a founder at We’re Moving I developed all aspects of the startup estate agency’s platform - providing one of the first online viewings system in the UK. The business became profitable in its first year of operation and captured 10% of its target market within 18 months.
At Ratio One as a Senior Microsoft SharePoint Consultant, I architected enterprise portal solutions for clients. I held regular seminars and workshops and spoke monthly at Microsoft on Information worker technologies.
At Civica I started out designing and coding bespoke web applications covering both customer facing, and heavy transaction orientated internal systems to public and private sector organisations, first internally and then on a consultancy basis.
Challenges: Customer facing solutions consultancy, rapid application delivery, public speaking
Platforms: .NET, MS Sharepoint, Coldfusion, SQL server