Owain Lewis

AI Engineer building production AI systems for businesses | Posts on AI, software engineering and how business owners can use AI | Founder @ Gradient Work

United Kingdom

About

15+ years building production systems. Former Director of Engineering at Oracle, leading public cloud services and working with engineers from Microsoft, AWS, Google, Netflix. My mission: help businesses and engineers build AI systems that create real leverage. We're entering a world where AI agents do the work and humans direct. The question is which side of the gap you're on. Tool user: Prompts ChatGPT, starts from scratch every time. System builder: Has agents that research, write, and code - creating output while they sleep. Most AI content teaches you to copy paste. I teach the patterns underneath - so you can build any system, for any problem. One person with the right systems can do the work of 10. I help people become that person. What I do: → AI Engineer: Community for AI engineers. Courses, resources, downloadable AI projects → GradientWork: Custom AI development for businesses → Newsletter: Free value every week 📩 newsletter.owainlewis.com 👥 skool.com/aiengineer 💼 gradientwork.com

Experience

  • Founder at Gradientwork
    Jan 2026 - Present · 6 mos

    AI freelancer building systems and custom software for businesses.

  • Owner at AI Engineer
    Jan 2025 - Present · 1 yr 6 mos

    The AI engineering community for builders who want to ship real software with AI and get paid for it.

  • Oracle (Full-time · 9 yrs 7 mos)
    • Director, Software Engineering
      Aug 2022 - Jan 2026 · 3 yrs 6 mos

      Leading an engineering org across three countries. Responsible for Tier 0 and Tier 1 public cloud services operating in 90+ global regions. API management, AI agents, AI.

    • Senior Software Engineering Manager
      Apr 2018 - Aug 2022 · 4 yrs 5 mos

      Senior Manager and service owner for Oracle API Gateway, a public cloud service deployed and operated in 20+ countries. Responsible for customer engagement, hiring and growing teams, delivery, and roadmap.

    • Senior Principal Software Engineer
      Jul 2016 - Apr 2018 · 1 yr 10 mos

      Service owner for CI/CD services. Managed delivery of MySQL Operator for Kubernetes and collaborated with MySQL team to ensure long-term investment in the operator. Led delivery of software used by Oracle Managed Kubernetes (OKE), including MySQL Operator, Cloud Controller Manager, Flex Storage Driver, Volume Provisioners and more. Worked with Netflix and Google teams on Spinnaker integration for Oracle Cloud.

  • Senior Software Engineer at FINkit® is Fiserv
    May 2015 - Jul 2016 · 1 yr 3 mos

    Built microservices with Scala, Java and Akka on IBM Cloud. Led a global remote team of engineers building secure payment APIs. Led POCs and demos for payment processing solutions to win new business with the UK banking sector. Wrote code generation tooling used by all services and teams to increase efficiency

  • Senior Software Engineer at BBC
    Mar 2014 - May 2015 · 1 yr 3 mos

    Built and operated core BBC public services using Scala, Akka, and AWS. Our team were early adopters of Amazon Web Services (AWS) building a fault-tolerant microservice architecture using Scala, DynamoDB, Akka, and Play.