Worcester Park, England, United Kingdom
20+ years building and fixing engineering teams across e-commerce, healthcare, travel, media, and finance. I work with startups and scale-ups to turn struggling engineering functions into high-performing ones: tightening delivery, reducing failures, building culture, and shipping platforms that last. Domain-agnostic. Hands-on when it matters.
Brought in to stabilise and scale engineering at a healthcare analytics startup; managed a team of 10 while rebuilding engineering culture, establishing processes such as code delivery, hiring and security/compliance (ISO27001, GDPR and HIPAA), and leading delivery of critical platform rebuilds alongside AI insight systems. Joined at a point where there was effectively no management structure, projects arrived and engineers self-started with minimal coordination, leading to overlapping work and unclear ownership. Introduced clear team boundaries and accountable ownership, alongside Agile delivery practices, OKRs for goal tracking, and a continuous improvement mindset. Key Achievements: Reduced change failure rate from over 30% to 5% within 6 months through improved QA, clearer task definition, and quality gates Improved team velocity by 13% within 6 months via process and tooling optimisation Increased test coverage from 35% to 80% on new projects through coaching, workshops, and standards Replatformed environments (Dev/Staging/Prod) to support scaling and safer releases Built automated CI/CD and multi-environment deployment foundations to reduce risk and improve consistency Introduced a company-wide career framework and mentoring practices to support sustainable delivery
I transformed a team struggling with inconsistent processes, high fault rates, and poorly defined projects. Implementing standardised procedures for incident management, application health monitoring, and communication of project risks, I significantly reduced major incidents and streamlined project workflows. Collaborating with engineers and the product team, I refined the Scrum implementation and improved progress reporting, resulting in increased team velocity and efficient onboarding. Optimising key metrics, we achieved faster task lead times, higher deployment frequency, and reduced change failure rates. Additionally as a senior technical contributor, I standardised core tools, promoted a behavioural-driven design approach, and developed in-house libraries, enhancing technical cohesion and reducing reliance on external solutions. My leadership approach and architecture strengthened the team's delivery capability and bolstered business confidence in our engineering team.
I led two engineering teams in developing and launching the businesses first critical revenue-generating projects, including secure hotel and tour booking systems compliant with GDPR regulations. This role marked the organisation's first significant handling of sensitive information for financial transactions. After successfully releasing the booking systems, my focus shifted to managing and enhancing the Content Management System (CMS) with two engineering teams, while also overseeing the deployment of a Digital Asset Management (DAM) project with a small technical team. During my time at Culture Trip I also led the London recruitment efforts, establishing best practices and mentoring the engineering team on the hiring process.
As Manager of the JavaScript and Web Team, I oversaw Line Management, Delivery, Technical Direction, and Recruitment. My role included leading development teams managing custom CMS systems for machine learning data and the public-facing website. I also managed an outsourced team aligning the iOS app features with the in-house Android app.