Curriculum Vitae

Experience

Never twice the same industry.

1. Real Links

   London, United Kingdom (Hybrid)

   Real Links is a SaaS B2B startup offering an innovative and multiple award-winning employee referrals and brand advocacy platform.

   1. Principal Software Engineer

      March 2023 – August 2025

      As Principal Engineer, I led the development of our SaaS platform, initially built in JavaScript and Vue with a MySQL and AWS Lambda backend, then migrated in a major rebuild to TypeScript, React, Next.js and PostgreSQL.

      We were an extremely lean startup, and I worked directly with clients on their implementations, including BT, Ericsson, Assurant, Chalhoub, Celonis, Optiver and Hello Fresh.

      I built backend integrations with applicant tracking systems, defined standards for LLM-assisted development, and led the business twice through successful ISO 27001:2022 certification, and also launched an AI chat agent built on OpenAI.

2. Medicspot

   London, United Kingdom (Remote)

   Medicspot is a B2C health-tech startup specialising in GP services.

   1. Senior Software Engineer

      November 2020 – November 2022

      I joined Medicspot to work on their online GP consultation service but, by the time I started, the pandemic was in full swing and I instead became technical lead on a new COVID testing service, initially partering with labs and generating certificates based on their testing.

      We built a web app supporting our mail order COVID testing service, allowing customers to submit test results online for inspection by our customer services team, then generating and emailing thousands of PDF certificates every day.

      When the USA opened up for travel with observed tests only, we integrated with Zoom to allow customers to book a slot and allow our staff to observe multiple customers taking their tests simultaneously.

      I also led one of Medicspot’s development squads, built integrations with couriers and the UKHSA.

3. City St George’s, University of London

   London, United Kingdom (On-site)

   Public research university, comprised of an ever-growing number of schools and centres, including Bayes Business School.

   1. Web Development Manager, Information Technology

      November 2013 – September 2020

      At City, I managed the Web Development and User Experience teams, with 9 direct reports at peak.

      I was heavily hands-on with development throughout my tenure. Major projects I delivered include full rebuilds of the City and Bayes Business school websites, the staff and student intranets, and a bespoke web app and CRM to support the Clearing & Adjustment process.

4. Games Workshop

   Nottingham, United Kingdom (On-site)

   Games Workshop is a vertically-integrated company designing, manufacturing and retailing the best table-top miniatures in the world. You may know them better as the “Warhammer” company.

   1. Digital Development Manager, Design Studio

      October 2010 – May 2013

      I set up a new team to explore GW’s digital product strategy, as a sort of internal startup.

      We launched a couple of fairly sophisticated iOS apps (an e-reader and a game aid), built tooling for the Design Studio’s EPUB workflow, and made significant headway on a prototype for fully online rules and army builder tools, which remains substantially better than anything the company has released since.

      Before the team was disbanded, we also made a fun but brief foray into video game development, before that was sensibly redirected to the Licensing team, and did some early work on what eventually became Warhammer TV.

   2. Lead Software Engineer, Global Web

      August 2002 – September 2010

      I was technical lead on GW’s eCommerce site, which during my tenure transitioned from Microsoft technologies to ATG (now Oracle Commerce) and Java, and typically contributed 10-15% of overall revenue.

      Back then, there were usually never more than two programmers employed by the company at any time, so I was also responsible for delivering the more technical elements of online products like global gaming campaigns – for example, the database and API components allowing hundreds of thousands of hobbyists a day to report the results of the table-top games they were playing in real life.

      Our “full” stack started from the hardware, which I was involved in specifying and installing in the data centres.

      I was Design Studio Employee of the Year in 2005. In a room full of artists, sculptors and game designers I’d idolised since childhood, a proud moment, and probably the most mortifying thing that’s ever happened to me in a professional context. At least while sober.

5. Zurich Financial Services

   Cheltenham, United Kingdom (On-site)

   From my perspective at the time, seven insurance companies in a trenchcoat.

   1. Trainee IT Developer, Atlas Project

      September 2000 – August 2001

      I worked on a project to streamline and accelerate whatever it is actuaries do, in the approximate wake of the Equitable (I think?) collapse and new legislation.

      This initially meant figuring out to make a Microsoft SQL Server cluster report receipt of files to an IBM mainframe, via a JCL script. This turned out to be very easy in Perl but very difficult in VB Script, which is what they actually needed it to be written in. I then built the data load pipelines to get those files into the correct tables.

      I spent the remainder of the year designing and implementing data transformation components. All the requirements were stored in UML diagrams stored as XML, so I was able to speed up that task massively by writing a code generator to automate the boilerplate.