Work

Experience

Staff Engineer @ Kaluza

Mar 2023 - Present

Scope: Staff-level IC leading modernisation across Orex and adjacent legacy platforms, shaping migration strategy, standards, and cross-team delivery across APIs, Kafka, and platform boundaries over 6 teams.

Key Work:

• Led modernisation of Orex, a formally tracked legacy estate spanning 30+ services and interfaces, reducing it over 2 years to 2 APIs and 1 event remaining.
• Led migration of the Kaluza Payments API gateway from a legacy implementation to the latest company-standard platform.
• Provided IC and engineering guidance for a separate communications platform as OVO worked to discover 80+ customer emails and communications in use and establish clearer ownership.
• Built tracking, ownership mapping, dashboards, and source-of-truth documentation that made decommissioning safer and gave teams and client leadership a clearer migration view.
• Aligned 6 teams, Staff/Principal forums, and client leadership on migration sequencing, standards, and risk decisions across Orex, supporting OVO Energy’s 4 million+ UK customers.
• Helped reduce incidents across the Kaluza/OVO platform by about 30% by improving monitoring and driving modernisation across the wider legacy estate.
• Mentored 3 team leads through regular 1:1s and technical guidance, informally shaping how the Staff Engineer role operated across migration, standards, and cross-team delivery.
• Moved services and databases onto the company-standard Kubernetes platform and datastore, reducing costs by up to 50% for some parts of the estate.

Staff Engineer @ Hopin

Feb 2021 - Jul 2022

Scope: Platform reliability, observability, and event experience during a period of COVID-driven hyper-growth, on a platform used by 100,000+ organisations and handling tens of thousands of events per month.

Key Work:

• Reduced cloud infrastructure spend by 30% through storage optimisation, platform migration, and traffic shaping for video delivery.
• Strengthened observability and on-call practices across Datadog, Sentry, Honeycomb, PagerDuty, and Firehose, giving teams better insight into failures during rapid scale-up.
• Led multiple event-experience projects across existing and greenfield products, including Sessions, Breakout Rooms, and Captions.
• Improved video quality and performance in a meeting platform where streaming reliability was central to the product experience, contributing to Patent US-11522934-B1.

Senior Developer (Payments) @ Tesco

Oct 2019 - Feb 2021 · Contract

Scope: IC-heavy payments engineering focused on resilience, security, and modernisation of business-critical gateway infrastructure handling around 4 million payments per day.

Key Work:

• Contributed to modernisation of a legacy Windows-based payments platform, improving service boundaries around security, authentication, ownership, and acquirer integrations including AMEX and Worldpay.
• Helped break parts of monolithic payment flows into Kubernetes-based and event-driven downstream services, improving maintainability and enabling faster development.
• Built internal tools and SPAs for fraud, suspensions, and reconciliation workflows, helping teams navigate payments data more efficiently and resolve issues including duplicate payments.
• Led work on load testing, serverless alerting, OS and framework updates, tooling deployment, and certificate management, reducing operational sprawl and supporting faster, safer releases.

Technical Lead @ Palace Skateboards

May 2016 - Oct 2019 · Contract

Scope: Early technical leadership for a fast-growing commerce business expanding across regions, including peak-demand product drops with order rates of up to 5,000 per minute.

Key Work:

• Joined as the first engineering hire and helped build the technical foundations for growth from a single-store operation to a multi-region commerce business.
• Designed platform architecture for high-velocity product drops where traffic spikes, inventory contention, and checkout reliability directly affected revenue.
• Built backend systems for real-time inventory handling and operational reliability during releases with order rates of up to 5,000 per minute.
• Tripled day-to-day warehouse fulfilment speed, reducing staff time and costs while enabling stock to ship faster than the previous third-party integrations.

Previous Work

Selected Earlier Highlights

• 7digital: Helped redesign streaming and download systems to handle almost 1000x traffic growth in a year, improving TTFB from 5s to 200ms at 200,000 requests with 99% availability.
• DigitasLBi: Helped establish CI/CD from laptop to production for 200+ developers, including outsourced teams, across a large multi-team delivery environment.
• NTSLive: First technical hire; took the platform from a single AWS instance to a more reliable global streaming setup, and built internal publishing and back-office capability as the team scaled.

Education

MSc Equivalent - Architecture and Distributed Systems
Instituto Superior Técnico (2000 - 2006)