Forward Deployed Engineer & Independent Consultant at BigBadBird (2024-09 – Present) Independent consultancy delivering embedded AI engineering for UK enterprise clients. Full forward-deployed model: absorb the client's domain, work directly with stakeholders, and build bespoke production systems on top of their existing infrastructure.
- Fit Out UK (construction, banking-sector clients): Designed and built an AI document automation platform running entirely inside the client's own Microsoft 365 and Azure tenant, engineered for rollouts serving tier-one UK banking clients.
Microsoft
Graph API with chunked upload, Entra ID app-only authentication, SharePoint integration, Smartsheet webhooks with idempotency guarantees, and automated docx, pptx and pdf generation. Compliance was a first-class requirement, not an afterthought: append-only audit logs with seven-year retention, PII redaction, DLP alignment, human-in-the-loop approval gates, and LLM usage deliberately bounded with output validation and per-document cost caps.
- Global Trademark Licensing (brand protection): Built a multi-tenant brand intelligence platform, piloted with an automotive giant, covering licensed-product footprint mapping, royalty cross-checking and counterfeit detection.
Full delivery arc: client discovery, multi-source data ingestion (official APIs, licensed data providers, ToS-aware scraping), an AI classification pipeline with killswitch, per-row audit trails, cost tracking and schema-validated structured output, entity resolution, and a legal gate ensuring no enforcement action leaves the system without human sign-off.
- BigBadBird Music (own product): A live, public platform of 25+ production tools for musicians, built solo. Integrates both major LLM providers alongside audio analysis, PDF generation, video muxing and WebGL. No sign-up required, shipped fast, used in the wild, and now the top-cited source in its category on ChatGPT. Also happens to be where the engineering meets a lifelong passion: active musician and producer. Founder at Kujira (2021-11 – 2024-09) Founded Kujira, a decentralised finance protocol that grew from a single product into a sovereign Layer 1 blockchain with its own interconnected financial ecosystem, a community of 50,000+ active users, and a peak market capitalisation of around $680 million.
- Launched ORCA in November 2021, a liquidation marketplace that opened institutional-grade liquidation bidding to everyday users. Processed over $150 million in liquidations and exceeded $150 million in total value locked within six months.
- When the Terra blockchain collapsed in May 2022 and took the entire ecosystem down with it, led the team through a complete rebuild: a sovereign Cosmos SDK Layer 1, designed, built and launched to mainnet in six weeks, with no external funding. Every existing token holder was migrated one to one.
- Directed product and engineering across a full financial suite: FIN (the Cosmos ecosystem's first fully on-chain order-book exchange), USK (an overcollateralised stablecoin), GHOST (money market), BOW (liquidity engine), SONAR (multi-chain wallet) and PILOT (launchpad), on a CosmWasm smart contract stack.
- Designed tokenomics around a fixed, non-inflationary supply with 100% of protocol revenue flowing to stakers, a model that was unusual at the time and widely imitated since.
- Served as the public face of the protocol: community leadership at scale, partnership negotiation (Axelar, IBC, Circle CCTP, Levana and others), governance design, live AMAs, podcast appearances and conference speaking.
- Stepped back from day-to-day leadership in 2024 to return to hands-on building in applied AI. Founder & Technical Lead at Lab19 Digital (2013-07 – 2021-11) Founded and ran a full-service web development agency serving UK and international clients, owning everything from new business and client relationships through architecture, build and delivery.
- Delivered full-stack web applications, e-commerce builds and CMS platforms end to end: requirements, UX, front end, back end, deployment and ongoing support.
- Hired and led development teams across concurrent client projects while remaining hands-on in the codebase.
- Ran the commercial side of the business: pitching, scoping, pricing and long-term client retention across an eight-year span.
- Flagd (2015 to 2016): Co-founded and led product on a recruitment technology platform that let contractors flag their availability, so recruiters only made contact when they were genuinely looking for work. Built and bootstrapped alongside the agency.
Named
Startup of the Week by UKTN and featured in Series 5 of its Elevator Pitch showcase, and invited onto the Web Summit BETA programme to exhibit in Dublin in November 2015. Contract & Lead Developer at Various (2008 – 2013) Contract developer across London agencies and product companies, including a lead role at Infosys directing an offshore team building web and mobile platforms for Vodafone, and the ground-up build of the fightme.com web application. Earlier roles in Durban spanned web application development and freelance client work.
