25 years building innovative software products and services in agile environments. At my best when distilling complex business requirements into a clear, simple and lean software architecture. A good communicator, interested in the wider business environment and able to offer strategic insight as well as technical leadership. A passion for working with smart (and funny) people to engineer great product.
Currently looking for short to medium term contract work as a backend or full stack engineer.
Pioneering a new approach to software development using agentic workflows to radically improve software developer productivity
Server side engineering with a focus on open source tools, cloud computing and data engineering
A talent for building developer friendly web service APIs that scale
Pioneering a new approach to software development using LLM-Powered Software Engineering Agents. I have been building the Higher Level Dev Kit which is a NodeJS server running Langchain/Langgraph powered agents and a Vue3 web UI.
Velo Payments is a an "all remote, no offices" start-up that was re-imagining business payments for the gig-economy. Working remotely with a great team of people to engineer a truly next-gen, data-driven, cloud-agnostic payments platform with bank-grade security. During my time with Velo, I have been responsible for, among other things, designing new platform features, integrating a bunch of new payment rails, increasing the throughput of the platform by a factor of 10+ and completely re-designing the security architecture in such a way that the platform can be deployed in many different scenarios including inside a bank's own network. The last year or so have been spent re-imagining a new high-performance modulithic architecture for a new set of products and building out the infrastructure components to support that.
AI Music was evolving music from a static, one-directional interaction to one of dynamic co-creation. I led the architecture and engineering efforts to build out Google Cloud infrastructure to support a highly ambitious mobile app as a first step on that journey. This involves a Spring Boot based API, a large social graph, many innovative audio processing components and Tensor Flow models running in Google Machine Learning Engine.
Cloudburst Strategy is a consultancy that specialises in leveraging the latest emerging cloud technologies in order to deliver value to our clients. We can work with the business to build proof of concepts or MVPs quickly and cost-effictively focusing on testing hypotheses and rapid iteration. In 2016 we have been helping one organisation in the leisure travel industry to utilise Google's new Flexible App Engine in order to build out an exciting new product as a set of Spring Boot microservices.
I came on board to help Steve grow the engineering team and the company. We had a good year with some tough challenges and in the process I had to get to grips with Google App Engine as well as some serious Android and iOS development. In the end some personal differences meant that we needed to part ways but the journey was a lot of fun.
Fourthmate (now pinpointworks) was a side project for about 2 years where we built out an android client and a spring, couchdb and elastic search back end that was capable of visually tracking work lists for super yachts and schools. In the end the major problem was one of selling rather than technology.
Working as part of the Oracle Business Intelligence Infrastructure Team in Bristol on the BI Platform, Fusion Applications and later Oracle Public Cloud. Oracle is full of high calibre engineers and I was generally operating as the tech lead within whichever Scrum team I happened to be in.
I joined Comtec on the back of promises made by the company to inject resources into the Travel Gateway division so that we could re-engineer this core component of the Comtec Travel stack. I spent the first few months designing a modular and highly scalable flight booking engine using Test Driven Design, Spring 3, Spring Web Services and Maven. However, budgetary pressures meant that I found myself in more of a technical project management role.
Funding difficulties meant that this promising start-up failed to survive. However, I spent my first 5 months with the company designing and prototyping a JEE standards based (EJB3, JPA, JAXB Web Services on JBoss), highly scalable, payment settlement system that was going to operate within the Amazon Web Services cloud (EC2, SQS, S3) that would have been capable of handling at least 300 million transactions per year. The RIA administration console has also been prototyped using Microsoft Silverlight and talking to the back end using SOAP Web Services.
Leading the development team in building an industry leading XML web service on an open source Java software stack. My job evolved along with the company and my main duties included systems architecture (new developments), software engineering (new systems and enhancements to the current systems), liaising with the other department heads (prioritising developments and open issues) and managing the work load of the development team. Although I am a capable department head, my interests clearly lie in the fields of Software Architecture and Engineering rather than managing people, which is really why I went looking for something else.
4 yr Masters of Engineering in Computer Systems Engineering — 2.1
Final year thesis was a set of C++ Neural Nets and an engine that used genetic algorithms to converge on the optimum network topology for any given problem domain & dataset.
Being a good dad to my 3 amazing kids
Watching every Liverpool FC match
Sometimes I try to start businesses :0)
Everything Bitcoin... fix the money, fix the world.