Engineer · CTO · Builder London · Available 2026

I build things that work at scale and I still ship the code myself. Thirteen years across banking, insurance, payments and gaming: from backend engineer to a CTO running 110 engineers through a company sale, to leading engineering at a £10bn lending bank. Now building Image Vault, an AI likeness‑protection platform for actors, and taking on a small number of consulting and board roles.

OakNorth/ Policy Expert/ CoinTracker/ Genius Sports/ Image Vault/ Judopay/ Xamarin Evolve/ Queen's Belfast
110→48Days to originate a loan
OakNorth lending platform
£2→10bnLending volume the platform
unlocked
50→110Engineers, as CTO
Policy Expert
60→5%Developer attrition
in twelve months
99.9998Percent production uptime
2022
9Platforms swept by
Image Vault Deep Scan
N° 02 — What I build Hands on · 2015 — 2026
BUILT, NOTBRIEFED
Everything below I designed and wrote myself — agents, platforms, pipelines, SDKs. Expand a line for the detail.
N° 03 — Career 2011 — 2026
ENGINEERTO CTO
Banking · Lending · Payments · Insurtech · iGaming · Crypto tax
2024 — PresentLondon

OakNorthDirector of Engineering · Banking

Complete technical strategy for the lending business of a bank capitalised to £10bn. Built the internal lending platform, brought applied AI into the bank, and worked directly with the CEO and senior leadership on board intelligence and engineering performance.

2023 — 2024Remote

CoinTrackerEngineering Lead, Data & Infrastructure · Crypto tax

Built an engineering domain from the ground up: migrated production compute from Heroku to GCP, delivered the first company‑wide data warehouse and visualisation layer, re‑architected the database access layer, doubled the team, hired a specialist security engineer and took the company through SOC 2.

2021 — 2023London

Policy ExpertCTO · Insurtech

Joined as DevOps tech principal, promoted to head of engineering, then CTO. Grew tech from 50 to 110 people across 12 teams, took deployments from 55 to 350+ a month, attrition from 60% to 5%, contractor reliance from 40% to 10%, and hit 99.9998% uptime. Put machine learning into production with a modern MLOps pipeline. Promoted ten technical managers. Led a successful due diligence for the sale of the company on the merits of the tech department.

2017 — 2021London

Genius SportsDevOps Lead · iGaming

Took a 100% data‑centre company into AWS. Rolled out EKS and Vault, a unified containerised build and deployment pipeline, multi‑tenanted AWS accounts and a security overhaul, setting the standards that flowed out from London to the rest of the group.

2015 — 2017London

JudopaySenior Security & Data Engineer · Fintech

Core payments, the public SDK team and the fraud team. Real‑time risk scoring on Kafka, an open‑source mobile SDK, and a speaking slot at Xamarin Evolve.

2013 — 2015Belfast

Dome TechnologySoftware Engineer · Construction

Mobile and backend engineering, including a mobile defect‑snagging application for construction sites.

2009 — 2013Belfast

Queen's University BelfastBEng Computer Science · First‑class honours

Year in industry in big data at HP Autonomy. Dissertation on sentiment analysis of the Twitter firehose using distributed computing.

N° 04 — Work with me Consulting · Fractional · Board
FOURWAYS IN
Short engagements, fractional leadership or a seat at the table. I take a small number at a time.
01

Startup building

Zero to one, fast. Fractional CTO for founders who need a product that works, an architecture that won't need throwing away, and a demo that gets a round done.

  • Fractional CTO / first technical hire
  • Investor‑ready MVPs
  • Hiring the first engineering team
  • Architecture that scales from day one
02

Creative programming

Engineering for studios, directors and creative teams. Generative models in real production pipelines, likeness and image tooling, and the glue that makes new tools behave on set and in post.

  • Generative image & video pipelines
  • Film, TV & VFX tooling
  • Likeness protection & detection
  • Interactive and computational work
03

Applied AI

Agents that do real work inside real companies. I've shipped multi‑agent systems, MCP servers and knowledge graphs in a regulated bank, with the audit, 2FA and security a board will sign off.

  • Agentic workflows & MCP
  • RAG, knowledge graphs, semantic layers
  • AI strategy for existing products
  • Production ML & MLOps
04

NED & advisory

Board‑level technology intelligence from someone who has run the executive side at scale: strategy, budget, hiring, security, board papers and a company sale on the strength of the tech.

  • Non‑executive director roles
  • Technical due diligence
  • Scaling 50 → 110 and beyond
  • CTO coaching & succession
N° 05 — Profile Never done
Curious By Default

I started as an application developer and never really stopped. Backend systems at scale, public SDKs, iOS and Android apps, cloud infrastructure, DevOps culture, then teams, then an org of 110. You name the type of programming, I've done it, and the holistic view is what I bring to a board or a founder.

What I care about is that technology is a value centre, not a cost centre. At Policy Expert that meant taking the company from tenth to sixth in UK market share and through a successful sale. At OakNorth it meant a lending platform that tripled what the bank could do, and the first real AI agents inside it.

Outside work I'm building Image Vault with people from film and television, which is where my engineering and the creative world overlap most. I attend AWS re:Invent whenever I can, read everything, and I'm never satisfied to stand still.

View LinkedIn profile ↗
Disciplines
Engineering leadershipCTO · Director
Agents & MCPApplied AI
Cloud & platformAWS · GCP · K8s
Data & MLKafka · MLOps
SecuritySOC 2 · Risk
Board & M&ADue diligence
Stack

C# · TypeScript · Python · Java · React · Node · Postgres · Kafka · Redis · AWS · GCP · Cloudflare · Kubernetes · Terraform · Vault · GitHub Actions · Supabase · Claude · MCP

N° 06 — Enquiries London / Remote
LET'S BUILDSOMETHING