Gem Agile
Founder and CTO2023 — 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.
King's College, University of London
Computer Science BSc • 1997 — 2000
2:1 Upper Second Class, Honours (GPA equivalent 3.7)
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