Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Engineering leader with 25 years of experience building and scaling technology teams across global media, humanitarian intelligence, management consulting and creative industries. Combines hands-on technical depth ( from embedded hardware systems to LLM-powered data pipelines) with strategic leadership of teams. Track record delivering complex products in ambiguous, fast-moving environments. I'm passionate about building engineering cultures where people have the transparency, ownership and autonomy to do their best work.
Hala Systems creates actionable conflict intelligence to protect civilians in active conflict zones, working with governments and NGOs across the Middle East, Europe and Africa. As Director of Engineering I lead the distributed technology team, responsible for strategy, recruitment, delivery, infrastructure and budgeting. Key work includes building Fabric, Hala's core AI intelligence platform and managing the transition from a grant-funded to a commercially-oriented engineering organisation, and optimizing for cost, quality and utility.
Bain & Company is a global management consultancy pivoting to offer clients strategic engineering and product build capabilities. As Senior Engineering Director I built and led a software engineering team, responsible for recruitment, engineering managers, and collaboration across product, design and consulting functions. I established the OKR process for the engineering function, led software engineering transformation projects with clients, and shaped the organisation's software, data and AI strategy. Navigated the organisational challenge of building a sustainable engineering function within a consulting culture.
I assisted a small Film Industry Startup (VFX) to develop a proof of concept "studio in the cloud" with all workstations, rendering, data storage and applications running in a data centre (Amazon Web Services principally) accessible using PCoIP technology. Working with the startup team for requirements and testing, and third parties for application integration. Using Terraform and Ansible for "Infrastructure as Code", Kubernetes for data and processing, Deadline for render scheduling and various bespoke systems to tie it all together.
During the pandemic Mill Film became the southern hemisphere's branch of Mr. X, headquartered in Canada. I built relationships with the Mr. X team in Toronto, Montreal and Bangalore, and worked with my Adelaide-based team to turn around a primarily on-premises working environment to one where our staff could work from home in a secure environment our clients were comfortable with. I worked on evalutating the technology and workflow requirements we needed to introduce to be most efficient when working across multiple Mr. X locations and with my team executed on that plan.
Mill Film was a VFX startup providing cutting-edge visual effects for major studios, particularly for Australian feature film production. I supported the business by evolving the render & storage resources, product development process, operations and workflows. I worked closely with other Technicolor VFX companies on joint technology strategies.