I’m an experienced engineer and leader. I like to solve problems elegantly, but know when to just get things done. I’m a voracious learner, and fluent communicator in words and pictures. I enjoy new challenges and tackling them with great people.
Experience
Form3
Technical Architect, USA — 2024–Present
I set technical direction for three payment products being built for the US market. Addressing the needs of the US market requires a different approach to our architecture. I’m building consensus toward a clear vision and coordinating a cross-team effort to deliver incrementally. I’m ruthlessly removing complexity and cost, while maintaining customer experience.
Our approach to the US has been quite different to other markets. I’ve discussed the geographical and cultural differences and how we’ve approached them in a talk at QCon: ‘How to Run on Three Clouds at Once, and When Not To’.
Staff Engineer, USA (FedNow) — 2022–2024
I support a team of engineers building real-time payment products. I keep the team effective by coaching engineers, reviewing code, and reinforcing good engineering practices.
I proactively identify and resolve blockers for the team. The scope of these interventions can vary from documenting a technical decision to coordinating across the org chart to make architectural changes. I recently led an effort to improve our core orchestration services, to allow teams greater freedom when implementing their market-specific workflows. Getting this moving involved a mixture of product knowledge and technical diplomacy.
Technical Lead, Information Security — 2021–2022
I onboarded and led a team of 8 senior security engineers. As we were somewhat outnumbered by the broader engineering team, I drove the introduction of a SecDevOps strategy to improve our relationships with colleagues, and ultimately our impact.
As an individual contributor, I coached our internal tooling team as they evaluated options and planned implementation of a new CI/CD pipeline. Supply chain attacks are a key threat, and my involvement with this project helped to establish a secure foundation that is still being built upon.
Technical Lead, Euro Services — 2019–2021
I led the build, launch, and production operation of three payment products in the European market. These include one real-time and two batch systems, handling payments for banks with over 1 million customers.
Senior Software Engineer — 2018–2019
I worked on the build of a real-time payments system, and built the initial implementation of our Confirmation of Payee product. I also contributed to the design of a new cross-currency product.
Senseye
Senior Software Engineer — 2017–2018
I developed and maintained back-end microservices in Go, and occasionally Node. I was involved in designing and developing some large features on the product roadmap, including our internationalisation infrastructure. I also worked to improve the testability of services, and vastly improved test run times to tighten engineers’ feedback cycles.
One iota
Technical Director — 2015–2017
I had responsibility for technical direction, and a pastoral role looking after our technical leads and over 25 developers across all disciplines. I represented the technical side of the company with clients, and the group board.
I worked to adapt our infrastructure and processes as we faced increasing scale of customer traffic and feature development. I facilitated teams’ work by improving business processes, development practices, and architecture. Having built up a monolithic PHP app, I led a transition to container-based deployment of some of our applications, using Go and Kubernetes.
Lead Engineer, MESH Platform — 2012–2015
I led a team building One iota’s core product, the MESH e-commerce platform. I balanced the needs of a growing number of internal and third-party API users as we expanded functionality and improved performance. I set up a new office in Wales, and hired engineers into the growing team.
Software Engineer — 2010–2012
I worked on a range of projects for an early-stage startup.
Others
- Teaching Assistant, University of Liverpool — 2007–2010
- Python Developer, Foresite Project — 2007
- Product Specialist, Audient — 2004–2006
- Drummer, Multi Purpose Chemical — 2004–2006
Education
- PhD Computer Science University of Liverpool — 2007–2010
- MSc Computer Science (Distinction), University of Liverpool — 2006–2007
- BA(Hons) Sound Technology (1st Class), LIPA — 2001–2004