Engineering leadership,
secure-by-design architecture,
delivery at AI speed.
I lead engineering organisations and architect the distributed platforms they run. Twelve years at Xref across four roles, from first developer to Director of Engineering. I've led through two acquisitions and their due-diligence processes, a multi-region GDPR refactor, and the build-out of a nineteen-person team from scratch. Most of what I know about engineering leadership was learned in the middle of those.
Currently
Removing the constraints AI exposed.
AI didn't create a bottleneck at Xref. It removed the old one — people typing code — and everything slow downstream of it suddenly showed. We shipped weekly, through three branch stages. I'm moving us to one trunk, merged continuously, deployed to production every day.
What I work on
Leadership. Engineering strategy and technical roadmaps, resource planning, team building and mentoring, and the estimation and delivery practices that keep forecasts honest. I have built organisations from a single developer up to around thirty across four disciplines, run hiring and performance management at that scale, and started an internship programme that converted four engineers to full-time within six months.
Architecture. API-first system design on AWS and Azure, Python and Django services, microservices and distributed systems, Docker and Terraform, observability with Datadog, and feature-flag delivery with TDD. I have taken a monolith to a modular platform and then to microservices, opened it up through revenue-generating public APIs, and refactored it across regions for GDPR compliance and global scale.
Security and quality. Secure-by-design development, vulnerability management and ISO 27001 practice, alongside AI-assisted review and development through Cursor and CodeRabbit. Formal OffSec certifications and secure-development training sit behind it; in practice it means regular scanning and remediation, vendor security assessments, client questionnaire responses, and 80% unit test coverage across the platform.
Career
Present
Director of Engineering
Lead a global organisation of around thirty engineers across platform, DevOps, testing and data. Delivered the API-first Trust Marketplace and the Enterprise platform, and established feature-flag delivery, PERT-based estimation and AI-assisted development.
2021
Lead DevOps & Security
Ran DevOps on infrastructure-as-code with CloudFormation and Terraform, and owned vulnerability scanning, remediation workflows and company-wide ISO 27001 activity.
2019
Head Architect
Led platform modernisation. Proposed and launched the Open APIs in 2017 and directed a multi-region refactor that enabled GDPR compliance and global scale.
2016
Senior Developer
Joined as the first developer and second employee. Rewrote the legacy application in Django, migrated infrastructure to AWS, and broke the monolith into a modular platform.
2013
Earlier: Python and PHP development in Sydney, software architecture and team lead roles in Pakistan, and five years as a lead software design engineer at Polycom Thailand.