Led engineering through acquisition, Series B readiness, BBC-scale reliability, and 80% infra cost reduction.
What I Do
I prioritise financial results, whether profit or exit, in every technical decision, with standards tailored to your stage of business. That means building software your customers keep paying for, since that is what drives both profit and exit value.
For AI products, I focus on turning demos into dependable platforms: agentic workflows, evaluation loops, human oversight, and the engineering standards enterprise buyers expect.
I can run your engineering team end to end: hiring, making the hard staffing calls, setting technical standards, and shipping. I scale up and down as you need, including full-time interim cover for a gap or a crunch, and I'm always available to come back and review the team and its practices from first principles. Whether the goal is growing fast, cutting burn, or preparing for funding rounds—without over-hiring or painful rewrites—the technology serves the outcome.
I also help teams adopt AI-native coding and delivery practices without losing engineering discipline: stronger review standards, automated checks, evaluation loops, and workflows that make AI a multiplier rather than a source of code bloat and complexity.
Most clients engage me one to three days a week, getting CTO-level expertise without the cost of a full-time hire.
Currently accepting one additional engagement, one to two days a week, alongside a YC-backed data science and AI company and a bootstrapped AdTech business.
Core Services:
- Cost-controlled delivery of high-quality software
- Engineering team building & leadership
- Technical strategy & scalable architecture
- Code quality, CI/CD, and delivery optimisation
- AI-native software delivery: agentic workflows, evaluations, and AI-assisted engineering teams
- Funding-readiness & SOC2 / ISO27001 / HIPAA compliance prep
Experience Highlights
Deepnote (YC-backed, $23.5M funding): helping move the product from a data science platform to an agentic AI workspace; preparing for Series B; raising AI-native engineering standards, improving enterprise delivery, and cutting server costs 40%
Remo.co (acquired by Events.com): led through hypergrowth to exit; 99.99% uptime; SOC2/ISO27001 compliance; cut infrastructure costs 80%
Festicket (UK's 6th fastest-growing startup): scaled team from 3 to 17; re-architected for 1000% revenue growth
BBC (400M+ users): Senior Engineering Manager for BBC News & World Service; AWS migration, >99.99% uptime, £9M budget
Credentials
Chartered Engineer (CEng), Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS) | MSc in Software Engineering, Executive MBA | Executive education at Harvard and MIT