Experience

Gem Agile

Founder and CTO2022 — Present


Leveraging 30 years' experience in technology from engineer to executive, from startup to enterprise, to help companies of all shapes and sizes Do Tech Better.

Gravyty

CTO / VP Engineering2017 — 2022


Executive management, responsible for all R&D activity at global EdTech company, scaling from startup to managing multiple products and teams via organic growth and strategic acquisitions, serving over 2000 customers including many of the world's finest universities.

  • Drive architecture and infrastructure vision across multiple products and codebases
    • Scaled org from one to five international teams, break down silos to stay Agile
    • Drive simplicity and homogeneity, reduce over-engineering / technical debt
    • Delivered CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code transformations for velocity, scaling
    • Hands-on code involvement, focusing on prototypes, infra POCs, reviews
  • Build winning culture and team (~30 devs), combined with right technology to deliver
    • Maximize potential by developing existing talent, recruiting best new talent
    • Evangelize Agile Principles driving excellence, self-organization
    • Commit to continuous improvement in process, culture, and technology
    • Promote efficient, effective face-to-face communication
  • Responsible for successfully rescuing full legacy rewrite, next-generation migration
    • Transformed distressed project to success under significant pressure
    • Updated UI / UX, revitalized customer relationships, sales pipeline
    • End-to-end responsibility for code, architecture, infrastructure, process, people
    • Transparently migrated >800 live customers, 100,000s of end-users to next-gen
  • Drive Engineering team to wider influence within organization
    • Balance velocity, quality by involving all stakeholders in communications
    • Connect directly with customers to gather feedback, build relationships
    • Develop security / compliance microsite for transparency, sales efficiency
  • Oversee M&A processes including due diligence, acquiring and being acquired
    • Acquired twice at eight-figure valuations by private equity firms in USA, Israel
    • Successfully integrated three acquisitions technologically and culturally
    • Identify, act on opportunities to standardize whilst retaining flexibility

Seeking Alpha

R&D Director / DevOps Team Leader2014 — 2017


Led team with 24/7 responsibility for infrastructure for world's largest crowd-sourced investment website. Served 200M page views, sent 500M emails per month.

  • Agile Scrum Master, roadmap planning, hands-on to code level
  • Transformed team from firefighting to productivity under great business pressure
  • Improved morale and delivery, built loyalty and respect by empowering great people
  • Migrated infra from bare metal to AWS cloud based on Puppet config management
  • Managed successful CDN migration from Akamai to Fastly
  • Refactored legacy code and paid off tech debt to benefit wider team velocity
  • Implemented automation to reduce human involvement in routine tasks
  • Built monitoring systems providing insight into production behaviour
  • Deployed smart alerting for targeted response to critical situations
  • Introduced ChatOps real-time communication connecting people and tools
  • Influenced testing culture and practice across wider team, improving product quality
  • Ongoing positive results led to taking over CI and BI responsibilities from other teams

Anan Computing

Chief Software Architect2014


Led architecture of cloud-based enterprise storage product.

  • End-to-end involvement in frontend, backend, integration, testing, UI / UX
  • Re-designed rough prototype to use MVC framework, accelerated development
  • Employee 4 working with subject matter experts in storage (SV veterans)

Amdocs

Innovation Development Expert (CTO Office)2011 — 2014


Defined and developed interactive demonstrations to illustrate strategic vision on topics including Big Data, BI / Analytics, NFV / SDN, Cloud, OSS.

  • Responsible for entire deliverable from ideation to development
  • Presented vision to customers, management, internal and external stakeholders
  • Delivered quality results, on time, in high-pressure scenarios
  • Supported GTM team understanding technical concepts presented by partners
  • Promoted culture of Agile tools and techniques

Reask

CTO2010 — 2011


Project management, system analysis, software development of social search engine.

  • Wrote prototype solo, then hired and led global development team
  • Responsible for feature roadmap, task allocation, code development and integration

Wayforth

Freelance Software and Systems Company Director2002 — 2010


Project management, system analysis, software development, sales and marketing.

  • Developed ePOS with analytics for innovative restaurant chain
  • Handled 100,000s of transactions per year
  • Designed and built custom information systems, websites, databases, embedded
  • Improved quality and cut costs by pioneering Open Source migration strategies
  • Sysadmin and support services, including file and mail servers, firewall, VPN

Nortel

Software Engineer2000 — 2002


Designed / implemented messaging interface in real-time carrier-grade circuit / packet VoIP gateway. Responsible for system benchmarking, load testing, management reporting.

Freelance

Consultant1996 — 2000


Development and sysadmin projects e.g. fully custom sales, marketing, accounting systems.

Education

King's College, University of London

Computer Science BSc • 1997 — 2000

2:1 Upper Second Class, Honours (GPA equivalent 3.7)

Skills (highlights)

Management style

Professional, approachable, drama-free culture promoting creativity and empowerment. Genuine implementation of Agile Principles e.g. trust and continuous improvement. Love delivering working software to customers and supporting others to realize their potential.

Tech (alphabetical)

Angular / AWS / bash / C# / CSS / ELK (Elasticsearch / Logstash / Kibana) / GCP / Git / HTML / Java / JavaScript / Jenkins / Linux / MySQL / .NET / Nginx / Node.js / Perl / PHP / PostgreSQL / Puppet / Python / React / Redis / Ruby / Sentry / Terraform / Vue.js

Outside Interests

  • Community First Responder for UK NHS, treating patients at urgent incidents
  • Accomplished semi-professional guitarist
  • Enthusiastic amateur chef and photographer
  • Sport and fitness as participant and spectator

Links