Tony

Strategic Technology Leader with 20+ years of experience and a proven track record of steering engineering functions through high-growth phases and successful exits. Expert in aligning technical roadmaps with commercial exit strategies, having navigated three major acquisitions (The Access Group, Markerstudy, Spotzer Digital). Bridges the gap between "Boardroom Strategy" and "Hands-on Execution".

Whether it's modernising legacy .NET monoliths into Azure cloud-native microservices or prepping an engineering org for due diligence, delivers stable, scalable, and audit-ready technology functions.

Head of Development (Fractional) at ClearCourse (2022-12 – 2026-05)

Division: Membership Services (Regulated/NFP Sector)

• Organisational Scaling & M&A Integration: Leading the post-acquisition technical integration of multiple membership platforms, harmonising engineering cultures and standardising delivery metrics across a distributed team.
• Legacy Modernisation: Architecting the migration from on-premise legacy systems to cloud-native environments. Established automated deployment pipelines and testing guardrails to reduce manual intervention, mitigating the risks while ensuring a predictable release cadence for core services.
• Technical Debt & Risk Management: Leading a multi-year stabilisation journey for a fragmented legacy estate. Balancing high-growth commercial demands with critical platform reliability by implementing risk-based prioritisation of technical debt, ensuring service continuity.

Development Lead / Manager at Paycircle Limited (2019-11 – 2022-11)

Context: High-growth Azure SaaS Payroll platform. Acquired by The Access Group.

• M&A Success: Acted as the primary technical lead during the acquisition by The Access Group; managed all technical due diligence and post-merger integration.
• Scaling: Scaled the engineering team to 15+ during a period of 4x customer growth.
• Compliance: Delivered ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials certification, critical for the platform's enterprise credibility.
• Fiscal Impact: Secured R&D funding via technical reporting, directly impacting the company's runway.

Founding CTO at Ultimate Pet Partners

Acquired by Markerstudy Group.

• Zero-to-One: Architected and coded the MVP for a full-stack digital insurance platform (Underwriting, Quotations, Policy Admin, Claim Management).
• Exit Delivery: Built the engineering team from the ground up and led the technical side of a successful sale to a major insurance group.

Part-time CTO at Akesios Search Analytics

Led the platform build through to acquisition by Spotzer Digital.

CTO at Answerback Interactive

Scaled high-traffic broadcast participation platforms.

Front Office Analyst Programmer at Citigroup

Engineered high-availability FX trading systems.

Consultant at Consultancies

Barclays, Shell UK, DEFRA.

BSc in Mathematics – University College London (UCL)