Feb 2024 – May 2025 · 1 yr 3 mos · Kent, England, United Kingdom · Hybrid

• The Kuflink group consists of multiple companies, comprising a bridging lending company, an online investment platform and a mortgage broker (21 Finance). As CTO I was responsible for all aspects of on-site IT and the development of the Kuflink investment platform, with a combined budget of around £1m.
• I worked at all levels of the business to improve operational efficiency and implement more robust process, directly managing a team of 10 people both on-site and abroad. The team comprised full stack development, Dev Ops and IT Helpdesk, including the platform’s mobile apps on iOS and Android.
• Key Achievements:
• Reduced development backlog by 65% through triage and cleanup, helping developer operations and business visibility
• Introduced a Definition of Ready to improve release quality and standardize
• Implemented a Change Advisory Board to improve business visibility and transparency of deliverables
• Organised the IT department to reduce time spent gathering required audit paperwork by 80% year-on-year.
• Successfully offboarded consultant IT support, website maintenance, software development and IT management as part of business restructures while maintaining delivery, reducing costs by 33% and headcount by 50%
• Removed business reliance on AWS Lightsail, reducing costs by around 20% and improving day-to-day reliability of core business infrastructure
• Recognised with internal company “Code Red” award, awarded to the most supportive and reliable member of staff.

Jun 2023 – Feb 2024 · 8 mos · Kent, England, United Kingdom · Hybrid

• The Kuflink group consists of multiple companies, comprising a bridging lending company, an online investment platform and a mortgage broker (21 Finance). As CTO I was responsible for all aspects of on-site IT and the development of the Kuflink investment platform, with a combined budget of around £1m.
• I worked at all levels of the business to improve operational efficiency and implement more robust process, directly managing a team of 10 people both on-site and abroad. The team comprised full stack development, Dev Ops and IT Helpdesk, including the platform’s mobile apps on iOS and Android.
• Key Achievements:
• Reduced development backlog by 65% through triage and cleanup, helping developer operations and business visibility
• Introduced a Definition of Ready to improve release quality and standardize
• Implemented a Change Advisory Board to improve business visibility and transparency of deliverables
• Organised the IT department to reduce time spent gathering required audit paperwork by 80% year-on-year.
• Successfully offboarded consultant IT support, website maintenance, software development and IT management as part of business restructures while maintaining delivery, reducing costs by 33% and headcount by 50%
• Removed business reliance on AWS Lightsail, reducing costs by around 20% and improving day-to-day reliability of core business infrastructure
• Recognised with internal company “Code Red” award, awarded to the most supportive and reliable member of staff.

May 2022 – Present · 4 yrs

• During the live shows live commentary is recorded with myself and 1+ other personality, which is then added to the matches in post-production and released to web and local television.
• I have also appeared on the company’s product as a TV host, setting up the segments of each episode.

Feb 2022 – Jun 2023 · 1 yr 4 mos · London, England, United Kingdom

• My team was a full-stack team of ten developers comprised of a mix of front-end and back-end software engineers, QA Engineers and Dev Ops resources, tasked with maintaining our player-side chat client and the host management tool that allows the hosts to facilitate the chat.
• My key duties as Team Lead:
• Fostering a team environment of collaboration, accountability, autonomy and transparency
• Mentoring direct reports, establishing career objectives and development goals
• Coaching the team to improve Agile ways of working, and working with the team to establish a stable and predictable velocity
• Coaching and assisting my peers and leveraging my experiences to help them get things done
• Producing reports on team capacity and project costings to establish value delivered
• Recruitment for vacancies in the team, including assisting other teams with interviews where needed
• Carrying out performance reviews, including salary adjustments and promotions
• General line management duties (holiday approval etc.)
• Additional:
• Internally I was part of a working group tasked with finding ways to measure team happiness and improve Agile ways of working. I also managed an internal initiative around our company instance of Stack Overflow to improve knowledge sharing and reduce dependency on specific individuals for domain knowledge.

Mar 2020 – Feb 2022 · 1 yr 11 mos

• Leading an Agile team of front-end developers in a Javascript-based project in the game integrations platform.
• Performing bi-annual performance reviews, including salary augmentations and promotion discussions.
• Recruiting for my headcount vacancies and assisting with recruitment for other teams.
• Providing updates to the development managers and directors of the platform and collecting the associated metrics.
• Working with Product Owner to better organize the team’s work backlog.
• Working on a cross-business initiative to better identify the happiness and health of teams across the business using a standardized set of metrics.

Sep 2012 – Nov 2020 · 8 yrs 2 mos

• Coordinating with Product Owners, designers, UX and the development team to identify functional and non-functional requirements for user-facing features and tech health improvements across the development stack.
• Working as part of a development pair to complete user stories for both user-facing features and internal tech improvements.
• Working autonomously within an Agile team to ensure that quality is optimised for the product under test.
• Liaising with developers, Product Owners and relevant external teams to ensure that project health is maintained while ensuring that scope is adhered to without compromising on functionality. Ensure that Agile ceremonies are performed to maintain operational efficiency within the team, running ceremonies where necessary and appropriate to do so.
• Creation and maintenance of test cases, test runs and reporting in Testrail. Tracking test progress and raising defects using the Testrail TCM tool integrated with JIRA, ensuring that the status of these bugs is progressed throughout the course of a sprint and highlighting issues that represent the highest risk.
• Using non-specific customer data (device used, browser demographics etc) obtained via the Tableau reporting tool to constantly provide effective test coverage by ensuring that testing time is used to test against the devices representing the best spread of customer configurations. Ordering, setting up, upgrading and deprecating devices using similar data.
• Mentoring junior members of the QA chapter both within the team and across the wider business. Offering recruitment assistance where applicable. Helping the team constantly improve processes, mindset and techniques. Documentation of pertinent and useful information using Confluence and Google Docs.
• Performed Scrum Master duties across various teams within the business, incdluding running retrospectives and sprint meetings.
• Scrum Master of 2 different teams consecutively for a period of around 12 months during this period.

Nov 2011 – Jan 2012 · 2 mos

• Interaction with customers experiencing product issues. Performing laptop services and installation of software for customers purchasing new machines.

Oct 2011 – Aug 2012 · 10 mos · Brighton/Rochester, United Kingdom

• Demonstration and sales advice/training on HP printing products in a partner retailer.

Apr 2010 – May 2011 · 1 yr 1 mo

May 2011 – Aug 2012 · 1 yr 3 mos · Brighton, United Kingdom

• Working as a functionality/accessibility/compatibility tester of e-learning/educational software.

Nov 2009 – Feb 2010 · 3 mos · Brighton, United Kingdom

Feb 2008 – Oct 2009 · 1 yr 8 mos · Rochester, United Kingdom

Nov 2006 – Feb 2008 · 1 yr 3 mos · Chatham

Jun 2005 – Jul 2006 · 1 yr 1 mo · Rochester/Ashford

Jun 2004 – Sep 2004 · 3 mos · Rochester, United Kingdom