Jan 2025 – Feb 2025 · 1 mo · London, United Kingdom

• (formerly RCI Bank, formerly RCI Banque)
• (re-engaged after 3-year gap following earlier success)
• Scope: Brought in by, and reported to, CIO to troubleshoot outages when all in-house teams could not find the issue. Led a full stack full infrastructure review from application architecture, application code, APIs/drivers/libraries, network, OS, virtualisation, Sybase database, and storage.
• Impact: Indentified multi-layer multi-root-cause factors. Briefed CIO with summary and detailed plan for respective teams. Brief to CIO was used to present to the Board. Landed the fix.

Jan 2024 – Present · 2 yrs 4 mos · London, United Kingdom

• Lead Board director on resolving a long‑running Chair–CEO misalignment that had become dysfunctional, moving the Board from “living with it” to a structured decision and succession within six months. Acted as the Board’s point person for the most sensitive steps: accompanying the Chair in difficult conversations, insisting on proper legal process, and negotiating exit terms that balanced fairness to individuals with the organisation’s financial and reputational interests.
• Known on the Board for asking the hard questions without creating drama: raising concerns privately with the Chair/CEO first, then framing issues for the Board in terms of thresholds, timeframes, and risk (“have we considered...”, “have we reached the point where...”, “by when do we need this turned around?”). Colleagues routinely come to me as a sounding board on whether something is a governance issue or just management noise.
• Served on the Nominations Committee through multiple cycles (new Chair, new MD, two NEDs), tightening process and criteria while improving the experience for candidates. Helped design outreach and “Path to the Board” sessions that directly increased both the number and quality of applicants, as confirmed by candidates and NomCo feedback.
• Worked with the Board and executive team to improve Board information and decision‑making: better timeliness and focus of Board packs, clearer metrics, and more usable financial and risk reporting so the Board can see issues early rather than react late.
• Acts as one of the Board’s technology‑literate directors, helping translate digital, cybersecurity, and early AI topics into governance questions rather than technical arguments. Initiated Board‑level discussions on an AI policy covering staff and NED use, and on how AI projects should be governed at Board level.

Jun 2023 – Dec 2023 · 6 mos

• Scope:
• Lead database engineer for modernisation of a legacy Sybase IQ estate to Azure, covering design, upgrade, and replatforming. Developed largely self-running, self-healing automation and refactored in-house DBA housekeeping scripts in SQL, bash, and ksh for newer OS and Sybase versions.
• Impact:
• Completed migration with zero unplanned downtime and zero incidents during hypercare, while improving performance and reducing operational toil for the in-house team. Enabled future changes on the platform to follow a proven, automated pattern rather than one-off projects.

Jun 2022 – Jun 2023 · 1 yr · London, United Kingdom

• Scope:
• Brought in to lead migration of the entire SAP Sybase ASE and Replication Server estate to a new virtualised platform, including OS and database upgrades, for business-critical trading and risk workloads. Designed and implemented an automation-led approach using Ansible and other APIs so migrations could be executed repeatably instead of by manual effort. Acted as lead author for the automation framework, primary escalation point for global Sybase operations, and main liaison between database engineering and operations.
• Impact:
• Completed all migrations well ahead of target with no unplanned downtime post cutover. Replaced fragile, manual processes with a standardised automated migration pipeline, reducing risk and operational toil while increasing confidence in the upgraded platform and future migration and DR activities.

Dec 2021 – Feb 2022 · 2 mos · London, United Kingdom

• Scope:
• Engaged to perform a health check of the SAP Sybase ASE estate and storage configuration for performance and best practice, then expanded to cover the full stack (OS, virtualisation, storage) for core banking workloads.
• Impact:
• Delivered a prioritised roadmap ranked by impact versus cost, from low-effort configuration changes through to storage and VM rebuilds, enabling the client to target the highest-value improvements first while minimising disruption. Immediate measures restored P99 latency well below SLOs and created a repeatable pattern for future work.

Jul 2019 – Nov 2019 · 4 mos · London, United Kingdom

• Scope:
• Brought in by, and reporting directly to, the CTO to diagnose and fix SAP Sybase ASE batch processing for trading and risk workloads that were breaching SLOs in a low-latency environment.
• Led cross-stack analysis and tuning across RHEL configuration, SAN and disk layout, database storage design, Sybase ASE configuration, and both server-level and query-level diagnostics.
• Worked with teams in London and Chicago during live batch windows and coordinated change windows across regions to land fixes safely.
• Impact:
• Reduced batch windows to comfortably within SLOs and restored confidence in core trading and risk processing.
• Delivered performance and stability gains at OS, storage, and database layers, turning a brittle, failure-prone flow into one the firm could rely on.
• Lifted in-house capability through targeted mentoring and documentation so the team could sustain and extend the improvements without ongoing external support, leading the CTO to extend the engagement based on delivered value.

Apr 2018 – Jun 2018 · 2 mos · London, United Kingdom

• Scope:
• Engaged by SAP as an independent technical tie-breaker in a long-running dispute with Morgan Stanley over the performance impact of RHEL huge pages on SAP Sybase ASE on one of the bank’s largest trading and risk hosts.
• Designed and executed intensive synthetic benchmarks driving concurrent workloads while inspecting deep Linux kernel and CPU performance counters, including chip vendor microcodes not exposed by standard tools.
• Produced vendor-neutral analysis and recommendations consumable by both Morgan Stanley’s infrastructure leadership and SAP’s product and field engineering teams.
• Impact:
• Replaced opinion-led debate with evidence-based policy, directly informing Morgan Stanley’s enterprise RHEL tuning strategy for Sybase-backed trading and risk platforms and SAP’s field guidance to other clients.
• Demonstrated credibility with both sides of a contentious technical issue, leading SAP to invite a sanitised conference presentation and to use the work in selected tier one global sales engagements, contributing to closing an eight-figure deal.
• Signalled to both bank and vendor that there was a trusted, external principal-level engineer who could adjudicate complex performance questions that crossed database, OS, and CPU boundaries.

Oct 2015 – Apr 2017 · 1 yr 6 mos · Melbourne, Australia

• (contract renewed four times)
• Scope:
• Augmented in-house database capability to support a non-standard Oracle to Oracle replication estate built on SAP Sybase Replication Server and Replication Agent for Oracle feeding Data Services CDC, for business-critical trading and risk workloads. Owned day-to-day DBA support for Sybase replication, including configuration, troubleshooting, and working to strict SLAs. Designed and delivered custom automation and monitoring to improve reliability and visibility of the replication platform.
• Impact:
• Helped the team consistently meet replication SLAs for business-critical Oracle workloads. Reduced manual effort and operational risk by automating common administration tasks and introducing targeted monitoring, giving earlier warning of issues and faster recovery when incidents occurred. Strengthened the in-house team’s ability to operate and evolve a complex cross-platform replication stack.

May 2003 – Present · 23 yrs · London, United Kingdom

• B2B consulting company used as the vehicle for client engagements listed below (banks, trading firms, fintechs, and other high-stakes environments).
• Work focuses on principal-level systems and infrastructure engineering, performance, and risk reduction, typically on an outcome basis rather than time-and-materials.

Jan 2000 – Jan 2003 · 3 yrs · Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

• Promoted once a year every year until Sybase ran out of field consulting positions to promote me to. This role was created so as to be able to promote me further.
• I was one of three Technical Evangelists in all of Sybase worldwide (one each in APAC, US, and EMEA); this was expanded to six by the time I left Sybase in 2003.

Jan 1999 – Jan 2000 · 1 yr · Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Jan 1998 – Jan 1999 · 1 yr · Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Jan 1997 – Jan 1998 · 1 yr · Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Jan 1996 – Jan 1997 · 1 yr · Melbourne, Victoria, Australia