May 2024 – Present · 1 yr 11 mos · Dubai, United Arab Emirates · On-site

• At Imara, we believe in creating more than just solutions; we craft experiences that resonate with your goals and aspirations. Whether you're looking for innovation that drives progress, reliability that builds trust, or creativity that captivates, Imara is here to elevate your journey. Our team of experts is dedicated to understanding your unique needs and delivering tailored solutions that meet and exceed your expectations. Are you ready to see how we can transform your vision into reality?

Jun 2023 – Jun 2024 · 1 yr

• Decreased operation costs by 25% in 2024 through contract restructuring and optimising our SaaS environments. I have driven and fostered a culture of innovation.
• I spearheaded the transition from multiple JavaScript frameworks to React and React Native, streamlining our development process and enhancing the user experience across our B2B platforms.
• To foster collaboration and innovation, I implemented the concept of tribes and chapters within the engineering team, creating an environment that encourages experimentation, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement.
• Reduced product time-to-market by over 30% by adopting COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) model for non-value chain-focused operations. This strategic shift has allowed us to concentrate on delivering value to our B2B partners and staying ahead of the competition.
• Under my leadership, the engineering team has undergone a cultural transformation, becoming an innovation-led group that eagerly embraces change and disrupts the status quo. With a clear vision for the future, I have developed a comprehensive engineering roadmap to replace our legacy B2B platforms by the end of 2024, ensuring that we remain at the forefront of technology and continue delivering exceptional value to our partners.

Aug 2022 – Aug 2023 · 1 yr

• Reduced & migrated three separate B2B platforms into a single, unified solution within 6 months. I have leveraged my strong technical leadership skills and innovative mindset to drive significant transformations within our B2B offerings.
• Implemented Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for all our services provided to partners. These SLAs are backed by engineering and CX support contracts, ensuring that our partners receive the highest service and support.
• Spearheaded the integration of LLMs such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude.ai into our products, providing enhanced contextual customer experiences and the enrichment of internal data to provide meaningful customer insights

Sep 2021 – Jun 2022 · 9 mos · Greater London, England, United Kingdom

• Joined the executive leadership team to align the Technology and Product teams closely with the commercial & marketing arms of the business to ensure they work together as a joined-up, integrated whole, focusing on the highest-value opportunities.
• Spearheaded the alignment of Technology and Product teams with commercial and marketing functions, fostering a cohesive and integrated approach to drive high-value opportunities.
• Led the development and launching of a cutting-edge recommendation engine, leveraging machine learning algorithms to personalise user experiences and increase customer engagement.

Jul 2021 – Sep 2021 · 2 mos · Greater London, England, United Kingdom

• Unlock the power of your data with Chain A.I. - a scalable & easy to use platform that enables your business to digitise its applications and lending process, reducing acquisition cost while increasing qualified borrowers.
• Unlock the power of your data with Chain A.I., a scalable and easy-to-use platform that enables your business to digitise its applications and lending process, reducing acquisition costs while increasing qualified borrowers.

Feb 2021 – Jun 2021 · 4 mos

• As Chief Technology Officer I oversee the IT strategy and vision for Bant.io and Zopto.com architecture and product development.
• A few key achievements in this role include:
• ☛ Manage an international team of software developers and product managers for both product brands.
• ☛ Champion R&D practices and iterative development as a key success metric.
• ☛ Train and mentor team members in delivering high-quality products.
• ☛ Introduced new processes to maximise efficiency and productivity.

Jan 2021 – Sep 2021 · 8 mos

Aug 2020 – Dec 2020 · 4 mos

• As Vice President of Software Engineering, I directed an international team of 64 engineers distributed across 18 different time zones in software product development.
• A few key achievements in this role include:
• ✪ Coordinated the complex emigration of an engineering team from between two countries in three months without loss of service.
• ✪ Began initiative to reduce increasing costs of +£360K by the end of 2022 by initiating and starting a mobile migration project.
• ✪ Streamlined technical department teams and processes and built teams focused on delivery.

Jan 2019 – Oct 2019 · 9 mos

• As Director of R&D Services, I formed and managed a team tasked with creating a disruptive technical product that powered a suite of innovative products.
• A few key achievements in this role include:
• ► Utilised previously developed BI and AI resources created from my previous position to produce several customer-facing products.
• ► Introduced a service framework based on AWS services (SQS, Lamba, EC2, RDS, ECS), with docker containers orchestrated by CircleCI, resulting in application time to live times dropping from hours to minutes
• ► I led the migration from EC2/ECS/Docker to AWS SAML (Cognito/Lambda/gateway/SQS/RDS). It reduced operational expenditure by ~£900K.
• ► Drove increased usage of React and Storybook.js for core website assets from an initial embedded experience to a complete site takeover.
• ► We configured all cloud-based applications to correspond to AWS Well-Architect Framework.
• ► We built and administered 30+ API-based services (REST/CQRS) for use by more than 400 developers.
• ► Leveraged AI and drastically increased training course subscriptions.
• ► I introduced Shapeup productivity methodology, which significantly improved teams ability to develop and ship quality products in less time.
• ► Managed negotiations and contracts with multiple third-party services providers and fostered positive business partnerships.
• My remit included:
• establishing technical roadmap and strategy
• technical design and implementation
• disaster recovery (DR) planning & testing (failure injection/resilience platform design)
• research & discovery of services and products
• I provided hands-on technical authority and leadership in developing new value-added services, which we supported from seed to scale.
• I worked closely with external partners to deliver bespoke services to Stepstone brands and B2B customers. Services were focused on candidate delivery, engagement and retention.

Sep 2014 – Jan 2019 · 4 yrs 4 mos

• As Technical Director, I established a multi-homed international spin-up team to design a disruptive technical product (profile amalgamation platform) for the recruitment industry to power an innovative real-time BI product suite. Mahiba, Stepstone Insights & Stepstone CareerPath were all derived from this product.
• I defined the technical vision, strategy, and roadmap for the product with the Chief Executive Officer and product managers.
• A few key achievements in this role include:
• ■ Developed, implemented, and supported the augmented profile BI product to accommodate over one billion consumer profiles.
• ■ Used unsupervised machine learning, cluster analysis techniques to identify related documents
• ■ Engineered an iterative processing pipeline with real-time extract, transform, and load (ETL) via event-sourcing for the operating platform built on AWS S3/EMR (Scala/Spark), RabbitMQ, and Elasticsearch.
• ■ Promoted user-driven prototyping as a means of shortening the product discovery cycle.
• ■ Employed a design-driven approach in defining user requirements throughout the domain-driven design (DDD), behaviour-driven development (BDD), and test-driven development (TDD) phases.
• ■ Spearheaded the design of an internal, robust, and scalable single sign-on (SSO solution with Access Management Service (AMS), which facilitated consensual sharing of consumer data among Stepstone acquisitions.
• ■ Resourcefully planned and administered a £1.5M operational budget.
• ■ Served as a key member of the merger and acquisition (M&A) team. Authored several due diligence reports on potential business acquisitions.
• ■ Influenced the formation of the company’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) committee and established various GDPR policies and standards.
• ■ Fostered positive business relations with solution partners and third-party services providers. Conceived a price-predicting cost matrix to evaluate PaaS, SaaS, and Internet as a Service (IaaS) providers.

Dec 2013 – Sep 2014 · 9 mos

• As Head of Development, I recruited and managed the development team, implementing Agile practices across the department to maximise productivity.
• A few key achievements in this role include:
• ■ Modernised operations by introducing iterative frameworks and processes to existing architectures and teams.
• setting business objectives
• ■ I established a training and mentoring program for the team to reduce dependency on third-party contractors and enhance the in-house skillset, decreasing annual operational expenses by ~£596K.
• ■ I created and led a training program to diversified and expanded the department's knowledge in technologies(Solr, Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ), frameworks (node.js, Spring), data stores(Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, SQLite) and languages (Perl, JavaScript, Java)
• ■ Championed virtualisation, influencing architectural decisions by suggesting and demonstrating alternative solutions
• ■ Developed SOA via RESTful API's which encouraged the use of API's to expose business functionality
• ■ Empowered self-development by giving developers access to learning resources, recursive mentoring and the freedom to test & share their knowledge. It led to a high degree of knowledge sharing, which produced a centre of excellence.

Aug 2013 – Dec 2013 · 4 mos

• Worked on a legacy code base which was monolithic, language dependant, complicated and mostly untested at any level.
• Developers & designers ALL worked with a single version of the repository using a per file universally locking mechanism. This method was a productivity killer.
• Deployment was performed on a file per file bases. As a result each environment (in fact each server) contained a unique instance of repository and unknown files. Often different versions of content were deployed to different servers.
• Naturally this resulted in a intensively manual release & testing processes which due to the risks involved was rarely performed. It had become a self fulfilling prophecy as each release was a major release with many changes increasing the risk of failure.
• During my tenure I:
• introduced TDD to development team
• Introduced BDD through out the organisation
• introduced SOA principles by creating a production ready REST API
• ran bi-monthly dev meetups, introducing a forum for discussion
• mentored the development team
• encouraged the development and use of a glossary or terms
• suggested & championed the use of a modern revision control system (GIT)
• championed TDD across all projects
• championed Agile principles
• championed the use of virtualisation (using my VM work)
• introduced & implemented a cyclical release process
• Also championed a team working towards virtualising offering.
• I also coded solutions :).

Mar 2013 – Aug 2013 · 5 mos

• Hired to complete and deploy a classic waterfall project 5 years in the making. The project was late and highly coupled, being embedded within all levels of the architecture. Introduced a light abstraction layer which in conjunction with existing work began the decoupling process.
• To improve code quality and reduce recurring defects (common in the company at the time) I introduced the following into the project:
• introduced unit test framework
• introduced TDD
• introduced BDD
• introduced and built first Jobsite VM
• All of the above was applied on a legacy stack.
• The project was released without major incident and was a measured success.

Nov 2012 – Mar 2013 · 4 mos · london

Mar 2012 – Mar 2013 · 1 yr · London Area, United Kingdom

• Leading a team in designing and implementing a statistics gathering iPad app (iOS) and a supporting server based API system.

Feb 2011 – Sep 2011 · 7 mos · White City, London

• Research & development around the concept of a new API to replace all of the numerous programme metadata API's within the BBC.
• Designed Nitro's API.

May 2009 – Mar 2012 · 2 yrs 10 mos · White City, London

• Supporting iPlayers backend API product Dynamite

Jan 2009 – May 2009 · 4 mos

• perl, love and film

Jan 2007 – Dec 2008 · 1 yr 11 mos

• The most enjoyable place I have worked!

Jan 2006 – Jan 2007 · 1 yr

Jan 2004 – Jan 2006 · 2 yrs

Jan 1995 – Jan 1998 · 3 yrs

• Systems engineer. Specialised in Cisco route configuration, network support, DNS management and application development.