Richard Smith

Founder and CEO of Codification

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

About

I work with senior leaders in regulated and complex environments to modernise legacy systems and accelerate secure delivery across Cloud Native, DevSecOps, and pragmatic AI adoption. As Founder and CEO of Codification, I lead a distributed team of engineers and consultants. We help large organisations translate security and regulatory pressure into practical, auditable controls and scalable platform engineering, speeding up delivery without increasing risk. I facilitate an EMEA-wide invite-only community and roundtables for senior decision-makers tackling secure software supply chain and AI governance challenges. I have 25 years of experience and before founding Codification, I led transformations across the public and private sector, including HSBC’s Personal Internet Banking platform, HMRC’s EU Exit platform, and DWP’s Pension Tracing Service. Today my focus is helping enterprises build operational systems that are scalable, resilient, and secure by default.

Experience

  • Founder & CEO at Codification
    Jan 2019 - Present · 7 yrs 6 mos

    I lead a distributed team of engineers and consultants. We help large organisations translate security and regulatory pressure into practical, auditable controls and scalable platform engineering, speeding up delivery without increasing risk.

  • DevOps Architect (Lead) at HM Revenue & Customs
    Apr 2020 - Aug 2020 · 5 mos

    Designed EU Exit (Brexit) platform architecture.

  • Enterprise Architect for Platform at HSBC
    Nov 2016 - Mar 2019 · 2 yrs 5 mos

    Designed Personal and Online Banking (private banking) platform architecture.

  • DevOps Lead at Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)
    Jan 2016 - Nov 2016 · 11 mos

    Introducing containerised Microservices and DevOps practices. The first service live was Pension Tracing Service.

  • Lead Consultant at Home Group
    Feb 2015 - Jan 2016 · 1 yr

    Cloud migration resulting in data centre decommission.