Adam Chesney

AI Engineer & Architect

Profile

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.

An expert in using AI to build state of the art agentic systems.

Higher Level Development

When Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 3.5 on Friday, June 21st, 2024, software development changed forever. Since then I have been building my own LLM-Powered Software Engineering Agents to become a 10x engineer. Higher Level Dev is the future, and the future is now.

Agentic Systems
Banking & Payments
AI & LLMs

Skills

Agentic Systems

Leveraging both frontier and open source models to build state of the art, truly intelligent Agentic Systems

Infrastructure

Server side engineering with a focus on open source tools, cloud computing and data engineering

API Design

A talent for building developer friendly web service APIs that scale

Technical

Languages & Frameworks

Java Kotlin Quarkus Spring NodeJS TypeScript Vue React Python

Infrastructure & Cloud

AI & LLMs AWS GCP Docker PostgreSQL Supabase

Practices & Tools

OAuth2 / OIDC Microservices CI/CD TDD REST GraphQL Event-Driven

Experience

Incept5

Lead AI Engineer · Dec 2024 – Present

Shaping the tech stack of the future. Building Eve Horizon, our own agentic toolkit that helps us radically accelerate engineering efforts across our organisation and those of our clients.

Higher Level Software Ltd

Founder · Aug 2024 – Present

We design and deliver custom agentic AI systems for organisations that need results, not experiments. With frontier models and our internal build agents, we turn complex software requirements into production-ready systems—fast.

Velo Payments

Lead API Engineer · Jan 2018 – Aug 2024

Velo Payments is an "all remote, no offices" start-up that was re-imagining business payments for the gig-economy. Working remotely with a great team to engineer a truly next-gen, data-driven, cloud-agnostic payments platform with bank-grade security.

  • Increased platform throughput by 10x
  • Completely re-designed security architecture for multi-deployment scenarios including inside bank networks
  • Architected new high-performance modulithic architecture

AI Music

Lead API Engineer · Feb 2017 – Jan 2018

Led architecture and engineering efforts to build Google Cloud infrastructure supporting a highly ambitious mobile app. Spring Boot API, large social graph, innovative audio processing components and TensorFlow models in Google ML Engine.

Cloudburst Strategy

Founder, Architect & Engineer · Jan 2016 – Jan 2018

Consultancy specialising in emerging cloud technologies. Built proof of concepts and MVPs focusing on testing hypotheses and rapid iteration. Helped organisations in leisure travel build products using Google's Flexible App Engine with Spring Boot microservices.

Screentime Labs

CTO & Engineer · Mar 2015 – Jan 2016

Joined to help grow the engineering team and company. Worked with Google App Engine and serious Android/iOS development.

Oracle Corporation

Principal Software Engineer · Mar 2010 – Mar 2015

Part of the Oracle Business Intelligence Infrastructure Team in Bristol, working on BI Platform, Fusion Applications and Oracle Public Cloud. Generally operating as tech lead within Scrum teams.

Fourthmate

Founder, Architect & Engineer · Mar 2013 – Mar 2015

Side project building an Android client and Spring/CouchDB/ElasticSearch backend for visual work tracking on super yachts and schools.

Comtec Group

Travel Gateway Architect · May 2008 – Mar 2010

Designed a modular and highly scalable flight booking engine using Test Driven Design, Spring 3, Spring Web Services and Maven.

Onelink Travel Systems

Lead Architect & Engineer · Dec 2008 – May 2009

Designed a JEE-based, highly scalable payment settlement system for AWS (EC2, SQS, S3) capable of handling 300M+ transactions/year.

Multicom Products Ltd

Chief Architect & Development Team Leader · Sep 1999 – Dec 2008

Led development team building an industry-leading XML web service on open source Java. Responsibilities included systems architecture, software engineering, cross-department coordination, and team management.

  • Migrated platform from Visual C++ to Open Source Java
  • Designed & implemented the first leisure GDS Web Service in the UK
  • Created Java/XML data binding and IoC frameworks before they were mainstream
  • Built high-performance XML-aware load balancer with sticky sessions
  • Implemented automated testing using real-world sessions for regression testing

Education

University of Bristol, UK

MEng Computer Systems Engineering — 2:1

Final year thesis: C++ Neural Networks with genetic algorithms to converge on optimum network topology for any given problem domain & dataset.

Connect

Beyond Code

Dad to 3 amazing kids Liverpool FC Serial entrepreneur Bitcoin maximalist Occasional DJ