About

I trained as a vet and worked in private practice and at a university teaching hospital, then as a freelance equine anaesthetist. I'd always written code on the side, and at 30 I switched careers. I've been a software engineer for twelve years since, at startups, scaleups and larger companies.

At the moment I'm most interested in agent orchestration. Most of my spare time goes into getting agents to reliably finish longer pieces of work.

Experience

2026 –Staff Backend EngineerThrive LearningLeading the backend function across a 50-strong engineering department, and architecting the customer-facing autonomous AI agent platform.
2024 – 26Senior Product EngineerHiveHRShipped a new product, added distributed tracing, and built generative AI features.
2022 – 24Head of EngineeringClinchdLed a team of five and set technical direction for the company. Introduced continuous release and feature flags.
2020 – 22Senior Backend EngineerImpala Travel TechnologyLed a team on feature delivery and platform scalability, and aligned backend direction across teams.
2016 – 20Lead EngineerHiveHREngineer number two. Grew a proof of concept into an event-driven microservices platform and a team of eight.
BeforeVeterinary surgeonBVSc, University of LiverpoolPrivate practice, a university teaching hospital, then freelance equine anaesthesia.

Skills

AI & agents

Agent platforms, Agent orchestration, Tool calling, Evals, Vector search, Embedding pipelines, Model selection, Claude Code

Backend

Node.js, TypeScript, Fastify, NestJS, Express, GraphQL, Event-driven microservices, Go, Python

Data

PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, DynamoDB, CosmosDB, ETL pipelines

Cloud & infra

AWS, ECS, Lambda, S3, Event systems, Terraform, Docker

Reliability

CI/CD, Observability, Distributed tracing, Alerting, Load testing, Feature flags

Frontend & leadership

React, Astro, PWAs, Technical leadership, Mentoring, Async decision making