May 2024 – Present · 2 yrs · London Area, United Kingdom

Sep 2021 – May 2024 · 2 yrs 8 mos · London Area, United Kingdom · Hybrid

• I lead the entirety of Engineering at Smart, which built and operates our flagship product, Keystone — a born-in-the-cloud, multi-client RetireTech SasS/PaaS. At its peak earlier this year, Engineering had grown to 330 developers and technical managers scattered across dozens of countries around the world. These teams support the full breadth and depth of our product, with key languages in use including React, Node.js, Ruby, Python, and Terraform. The solution runs predominantly on AWS, with some limited additional workloads with Google (GCP).
• We’ve managed the thread the needle between meeting the behavioural and regulatory expectations of our enterprise financial clients, while adopting modern tech practices like GitOps initiated CI/CD (20-30 daily deploys into production), Slack ChatOps enabled observability and self-service workflows, on-demand ephemeral dev environments, automated quality, security, and compliance checks integrated into our pipelines, and extensive use of feature-flag enabled testing/experimentation.
• I report into the Smart exec team, and regularly interface with existing and prospective clients. As our most senior technical leader, I engage with client stakeholders ranging from the C-suite to individual contributor technical and business staff. This includes engaging in pre-sales support, selective requirements solicitation, relationship management, and high-profile issue resolution. I also frequently support M&A assessment and post-acquisition absorption planning/execution.

Aug 2020 – Aug 2021 · 1 yr · London, England, United Kingdom · Remote

• Led a global Platform Engineering organisation owning a wide range of developer and customer-facing services. These services span the full width and depth of the 10x stack, from AWS and managed services infrastructure, to the Kubernetes ecosystem, to dev and platform-enabling applications running in these clusters, to highly bespoke distributed data systems, to full-stack support and observability, to client interfaces and tooling.
• Developed and delivered a plan to move the Platform team from an antiquated and error-prone manual release cadence to full continuous delivery over a period of just a few months.  This was especially complicated in our multi-tenanted client environment.  Cycle times dropped from days to just minutes for most kinds of changes. This included introducing the company to its first functional GitOps implementation.
• Selected and deployed tooling to enable ChatOps for a number of internal services, which included orchestrating a company-wide migration to Slack.
• Continuously improved ways of working in both development and operations spaces. This has included moving to sprint-based delivery, replacing service desk systems to shrink the support gap between clients and engineering teams, and instituting a range of working pattern and tool changes to optimise for remote-first, asynchronous global collaboration.

Sep 2019 – Jul 2020 · 10 mos · London, England, United Kingdom

• Led development of a multi-cloud PaaS solution to modernise, standardise, and accelerate consumption of cloud infrastructure by developers. Our self-serve PaaS allowed dev teams to deploy secure, validated, and codified changes - and even full ephemeral environments - without Platform team intervention, via a simple service catalogue abstraction through a range of interfaces.
• Worked alongside engineering customer teams to architect, build/migrate, and support microservices infrastructure, predominantly on AWS.
• Managed a diverse, global team of engineers and delivery/product managers responsible for supporting customer environments, building/supporting shared tools, and developing strategic platform services.
• Served as member of the Travelex Tech Leadership team, helped to drive technology investment, set policy, and evangelise/implement agile behaviours and DevOps methodologies across the wider business.

Jan 2019 – Sep 2019 · 8 mos

• Oversaw delivery for 15 global tech teams across a range of domains, including infrastructure, platform, security, and tech operations teams.
• Alongside product and engineering partners, collaboratively developed and delivered engineering roadmaps consisting of large, strategic projects, while also building and improving team structures to manage operational workloads.
• Planned and facilitated transformation of disparate engineering teams into cohesive, complementary organisations with unified, expanded missions. Championed and incorporated agile values, even in waterfall teams.

May 2017 – Jan 2019 · 1 yr 8 mos

• Oversaw global delivery of all infrastructure domain programmes, including DevOps, IT, and Information Security teams, as well as for our full Central European application stack.
• Successfully ran large-scale, strategically important re-platforming migration and consolidation projects from assorted legacy hosting providers to AWS, including containerising workloads with Docker for deployment onto globally standardised Apache Mesos-based orchestration platforms.
• Responsible for global DevOps project delivery. These teams are responsible for designing, building, and operating all production infrastructure across a range of cloud service providers.
• Responsible for global engineering changes associated with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and (CCPA) California Consumer Privacy Act compliance, including new capability development and wide-scale security hardening of services and assets.

Feb 2014 – May 2017 · 3 yrs 3 mos · London, United Kingdom

• Built and managed the Custom Systems Engineering (CSE) team, who were responsible for the management and execution of complex project work for Rackspace’s largest EMEA enterprise customers (“Custom”). The CSE team was a full-stack, cross-functional engineering squad composed of senior engineers with varied specialisations in DevOps, Linux and Microsoft ecosystems, multi-platform virtualisation, public and private cloud, and enterprise storage technologies.
• Acted as primary managerial liaison between Custom and global Technical Support, Infrastructure, and Professional Services teams. Also frequently provided support and consultation to Service Management, Legal, Sales, Product, and both UK and International Strategy and Corporate Development teams.
• Responsible for creating and sustaining a wide range of improvement programmes both inside and outside of Custom in disciplines such as service design, talent development, work tracking and measurement, organisational alignment, tooling development/licensing, and customer-focused process improvement.
• Designed, built, and hired the Custom Service Desk team, a dedicated front-line support service catering to our premier customers.
• Multi-year ‘Manager of the Year’ nominee, and was consistently among the highest-rated managers at Rackspace.

Jun 2010 – Feb 2014 · 3 yrs 8 mos

• As regional professional services lead, oversaw development and deployment of highly secure, semi-centralised emergency response and access control networks. Over this period, work captured more than doubled, with a cumulative annual worth of $15-25 million spread across myriad customer sites, while the customers’ total cost of ownership decreased on a per-system basis.
• Managed a diverse team of approximately 25 geographically dispersed technicians and engineers in both solution development and support operations.
• Prepared RFPs and responses, authored statements of work, served as contract selection board chairman, created and tracked programme performance metrics, wrote contract appraisals, and engaged in vendor and supplier management.
• Performed or oversaw requirements solicitation, engineering and design, deployment, testing and turnover for all projects.
• Provided programme-wide IT consultancy and analysis. Deployed internal tools and systems that significantly enhanced performance, resiliency and traceability across the project.

Sep 2003 – Jun 2010 · 6 yrs 9 mos

• Worked as a customer-facing engineering lead on a consultancy/contract basis for predominantly public-sector clients on a range of projects lasting between 6 and 18 months. These engagements included the below example deliveries.
• Developed numerous communication and collaboration tools for use by internal employees and clients around the US. These systems included custom instant messaging and video streaming solutions, a high-performance Linux-based computing cluster, a wiki/collaboration portal, and customisation and development of an email-to-HTML caching and publishing system.
• Designed and oversaw deployment of a major upgrade of compute services and hardware for a client’s flagship nuclear emergency control centre.
• Selected, deployed, and operated network security tooling (IDS, IPS, etc) for a classified enclave.
• Managed a Network Operations team responsible for all classified and unclassified networks at a substantial data centre with a local user base of thousands.
• Led development of ITIL-derived processes for adoption by a client with the world’s largest intranet.