Thirty years, and the numbers behind them.

Graffic Jam Ltd

Director, Chief Architect & Lead Engineer
Brighton
2021 to 2026

A bespoke, event-driven cloud platform for large-scale corporate events, delivered for a Fortune 500 client (£6.5bn annual revenue) as the system behind its flagship global recognition and incentive programme. It runs as a set of independent services, so a feature can be changed or scaled on its own and a new event stood up by configuration rather than fresh code.

• 8 events across 4 locations and 4 time zones for 6,000+ attendees in a single year: Hawaii, the US West Coast, Europe and Australia
• 25,000 personal and 1,000 group bookings handled; 50,000 image assets processed; 300,000+ photos and videos pushed to on-site digital signage
• A media archive of 1.5m+ images and videos spanning 20 years, available around the clock
• Architected and built it end to end: .NET services, a React and Next.js front end, Blazor admin tooling, a React Native on-site app and a headless CMS
• Ran it as a proper AWS estate: multi-account separation of duties, ECS Fargate, Aurora PostgreSQL, S3 and CloudFront, all in Terraform, CI/CD on CodePipeline, identity via Auth0 federated to the client’s provider
• Acted as technical and commercial lead with the client, including continuity and transition planning for the platform

.NET · C# · React & Next.js · Blazor · React Native · AWS · Terraform · Auth0 · PostgreSQL

AWS

Principal Solution Architect
Start-ups & Scale-ups, UK & Ireland
January to August 2021

Recruited by AWS as an L7 Solution Architect, supporting some of its largest start-up and scale-up customers across the UK and Ireland, from FinTech to B2B SaaS. I advised founders and engineering leaders on architecture and process, and on what good looks like at that stage.

• Became AWS certified and a Microsoft Specialist during this period
• Chose to move back to hands-on, team-based building and the smaller, close-knit companies I most enjoy helping

AWS · Solution architecture · Well-Architected

Benchmark Capital Group

Chief Architect
Schroders · Sussex
2015 to 2021

A financial-planning and advice platform that now administers over £17bn for more than 1,000 advisers. I joined while it was still privately owned and helped take it through to becoming part of Schroders, who acquired a 65% stake for £86m in 2016 and the remaining minority in 2021.

• Grew and organised the development and operations group from around 15 to 100 people, structured into 8 SAFe scaled-agile teams, and was promoted to Chief Architect
• Delivered the software architecture that let Benchmark onboard the Lloyds Bank and Schroders joint venture, adding £10bn+ in managed assets
• Took the systems from a monolith to an event-based services architecture
• Designed and ran the move from RackSpace to Azure, and provisioned the CI/CD pipeline
• Formalised the software development processes and helped prepare the business through its acquisition

.NET · Azure · Azure Service Bus · SQL Server · CI/CD · SAFe

ETZ Technologies

CTO & Co-founder
Brighton
2008 to 2015

A SaaS provider of back-office automation for the recruitment industry: online timesheets, automated invoicing, payment tooling and streamlined back-office accounting, with over 400 clients across 20 countries.

• Built the company with my business partner from 2 people to 30 staff and £2m annual turnover, with no outside seed capital
• Owned the strategy and architecture of the software and services, and directly line-managed 14 developers, an architect, 6 testers and support staff
• Built the CI/CD pipeline and cloud-hosted environment, and moved the platform onto Azure, adopting SOA, NServiceBus and a microservices design

.NET · Azure · NServiceBus · SOA · SQL Server

Microsoft

Technical Architect, EMEA Events & Principal Consultant
EMEA
1999 to 2008

Promoted from Principal Consultant to Technical Architect of the EMEA Events team in 2003, delivering the technology behind high-profile conferences including TechEd, IT Forum and Convergence.

• Attendee systems, registration, event management and content tools, plus on-site connectivity and networking
• Worked with partners including KPMG, Telefónica, HP and Dell
• My sessions regularly ranked in the top 5 to 10 presented at each event

IBM UK

Business Recovery Solutions Architect
UK & USA
1993 to 1999

Disaster-recovery network and facility design, dealing-room and back-office systems, and customer solution design at board level, including a period with IBM BRS in the USA.