Technical Director at Poppins Agency (2021-10 – Present)
Set up and led the engineering function from headcount zero, building a division in Belfast run out of the London HQ. Sole technical lead across all new business and client growth.
- Set the AI governance standards and built guardrails across the delivery pipeline so engineers could use any model or agent they wanted without putting production quality at risk
- Delivered agentic content workflows for a global jewellery house inside a zero-trust environment over six months, shortening the path from campaign trend to published content, and built the deployment architecture their marketing team ran it on
- Built out and advised strategies for effective harness engineering and AI adoption for clients, separating what will inevitably be replaced (context, compute) from the infrastructure that has to persist, steering them away from quick wins that get overwritten
- Built the company's internal RAG architecture (vector and vectorless) and skills library, which drove significant month-on-month reduction in token cost
- Built a client-facing bug reporting agent that fixed and raised PRs for roughly 80% of reported bugs
- Designed and shipped a real-time AI assistant handling sensitive medical data for a longevity clinic, deployed into the client's own production environment and running under their ownership since handover
- Founded the engineering division with no existing structure in place. Hired five permanent engineers directly, and a technical product manager - supported by an offshore team of up to ten sized against project volume and complexity
- Nobody left voluntarily. The team only dispersed when the agency exited technical delivery
- Wrote the full progression framework, covering junior through senior with distinct tracks for lead, staff and management, and hired predominantly at graduate level, coaching engineers to mid-tier inside six months
- Introduced delivery processes, sprint cadences and quality controls that scaled output across concurrent products without adding overhead
- Technical lead across three enterprise engagements worth around £5M in annual contract value with Bonhams, McLaren, De Beers, WSJ
- Worked directly with client heads of engineering, product managers and design teams at Bonhams, and with European and Japanese leadership at Fujifilm, across a spectrum from engineering-led to marketing-led briefs
- Sole and first technical point of contact on all inbound new business and account growth, attributed to wins across every client brought in. This was critical in building solution capability
- Sold technical solutions through a creative-led sales motion, translating engineering value for buyers with no technical frame of reference
- Built and managed a European partner ecosystem across cloud, creative and delivery, including a strategic partnership with Vercel that underpinned deployment across enterprise accounts
- Owned end-to-end architecture and front-end delivery for 15+ clients across fintech, automotive, luxury and media, ranging from marketing sites through to web apps and admin portals
Lead Product Manager (Contract) at Tide (2021-05 – 2021-12)
- Led discovery, vendor selection, budget negotiation and implementation of Tide's replacement customer support platform across the UK and India, in a regulated financial services environment
- Worked with Tide's head of engineering, executive team, product, customer support and compliance functions, leading my own team while coordinating across teams I did not own
- Managed a fully remote cross-functional team of five engineers and three product owners across London, Sofia and India
- Rolled the platform out to Tide's entire user base in one week, bringing down response times and ticket volume
- Integrated the new data model into Tide's data lake (Snowflake/AWS) and built the dashboards that let the support organisation see its own SLA performance
Founder & Technical CEO at Flyte Technologies (2015-09 – 2019-06)
Founded and built a SaaS platform for commercial drone flight planning and risk assessment, taking it from idea to 4,000 users across 32 countries.
- Did the market validation myself, 350 interviews and 1,200 survey responses, raised £120K seed and had paying customers within six months
- Built a real-time telemetry platform on the ELK stack, recording live flight data and running low-latency spatial queries against risk databases
- Hit 86% MAU growth in the first six months by staying close to users and iterating on direct feedback
- Led a lean team through a market where the regulation changed every few months, making architecture decisions that let us pivot without rewriting everything
Technical Architect (Contract) at Enixa (2018-06 – 2021-10)
- Owned the architecture of a leadership content platform through its growth phase to $1.6M ARR within 12 months, in a distributed six-person team
- Embedded with enterprise customers including Macquarie Group to find the features worth building and the places the platform was going to strain
Senior Developer (Contract) at Skyscanner (2019-05 – 2019-10)
- Led the rebrand of Skyscanner's public help centre in a squad of five engineers and a product manager, shipping journey changes and deferral features aimed at reducing the need to contact support
- Contact volume fell around 20% month on month across the programme and NPS rose ten points
Developer at thinkWhere (2013-09 – 2015-08)
- Built spatial applications for UK energy regulators including OFGEM
- Led technical modernisation of thinkWhere's cloud Web GIS platform
