Engineering leadership

Ongoing engagement with a personal finance platform that connects a user's bank accounts and shows them how their position compares to people like them. Built the team and the product from scratch, live on Android and iOS and ISO 27001-certified inside twelve months.

• -Built the MVP from scratch, laying foundations solid enough to keep pace with delivery
• -Hired and ran a small, strong team once the angel round closed
• -Integrated Open Banking, and navigated the UK regulation that comes with being an Open Banking consumer
• -Wrote an auto-categorisation engine combining human-editable rules with a machine learning model
• -Set the multi-year technical and product strategy against the funding milestones
• -Led the technical side of the company's ISO 27001 certification

Ongoing engagement with a carbon business whose internal platform had been built largely by a co-founder using AI-assisted development, and needed to be ready for external users and a first engineering team.

• -Stabilised the codebase ahead of opening the platform up to external users
• -Audited and refactored the large Next.js and TypeScript application - API routes, Firebase integrations, and the financial modelling tools
• -Brought consistency and structure to a codebase that had grown fast and organically, to the point an engineering team could take it over with confidence
• -Worked out which roles they needed to hire, then helped them do the hiring

Engagement with a structural engineering knowledge platform who had proved product-market fit with an AI-generated prototype, and needed a V1 that could carry real customers.

• -Audited the prototype and traced the reliability and scalability problems customers were already reporting
• -Ran a technical discovery, then hired and managed a third-party consultancy to start the V1 rebuild - re-architecting for reliability while keeping what already worked
• -Kept design partners confident in the platform while the rebuild ran alongside it
• -Helped them make their first software engineering hires

Short engagement with a music-tech business who had a prototype built without engineers, and needed both a team and a product they could rely on.

• -Audited the vibe-coded iOS prototype and found the gaps in architecture, security, performance and scalability
• -Wrote the roadmap from proof of concept to a reliable, scalable MVP - including what was worth salvaging and what was quicker to rebuild
• -Hired and ran a small, strong team - a designer and two engineers
• -Put automated testing, CI/CD and monitoring in place so the product could hold up in production

Short engagement with a climate-tech data business, who had just completed their seed funding round and needed to professionalise their software and data delivery.

• -Reviewed architecture and both their software and data delivery mechanisms, then helped implement the changes
• -Mentored their existing team, especially the founding engineer
• -Advised the founders on how to build a mature, reliable product engineering org

Short engagement with an AI energy modelling business who were applying for pre-seed funding and working out their product-market fit.

• -Scoped and designed the product roadmap from proof of concept through MVP to V1
• -Designed the architecture and built that first proof of concept from scratch
• -Took academic surrogate modelling research and made it work in a production platform
• -Contributed technical content and architecture diagrams to successful funding pitches

Created the technology function from nothing at pre-seed stage and grew it to a product engineering team of around twenty to Series C.

• -Founding engineer: wrote the December 2021 MVP and the very first data model of the Voluntary Carbon Market
• -Took it from rough designs to a full V1 SaaS launch in April 2022 - the platform that carried the company through Seed -> A -> B -> C to become the world's leading carbon ratings provider
• -Reporting to the CEO, grew Product Engineering from a single engineer to a multi-team department, and myself from writing all of it to managing managers
• -Defined the recruitment process, the career progression framework, and the headcount split across devops, infrastructure, security, IT, product, design and engineering
• -As the most senior technical voice, helped the leadership team put the funding to work - engineering, data, geospatial, product and research all grew on the back of it, alongside a more efficient internal ratings process
• -Held the balance between feature work, client commitments, quality and the non-functional work that only pays back later

Learning my trade as a software engineer!

• -Zalando
• -Grail
• -Kingfisher
• -Pivotal Labs
• -Lloyds Banking Group
• -CM-Logic