The Wellcome Trust is a biomedical research charity with a £23bn endowment and is one of the largest non-governmental funders of scientific research in the world.

Wellcome engaged me to work with them in two capacities. Firstly to work with their tech and product team on maintenance and development of their digital estate including intranet, corporate site and campaign sites. Secondly to create a future technology strategy providing recommendations for platforms and libraries to use to support the Trust over the next 5 - 10 years.

• API integration with facilities management software to enable meeting room booking from the intranet.
• Exposing Apache Solr search as an API to be consumed by a large static site.
• Working with stakeholders and product management to help ensure ease and feasibility of technical development.

EmpowerRD is a London based, VC backed fintech startup which is taking on the R&D tax credit claims industry. Incumbents typically charge more than 20% of the tax credit companies receive and provide a slow, human intensive service. EmpowerRD provide an automated, self-serve platform backed by expert R&D consultants for a fraction of the fee.

I joined the team as CTO and oversaw the development of the core product from idea to launch and beyond. As well as development I implemented a lightweight, agile delivery process and recruited a remote team to assist with development.

• Core product development using Ruby on Rails, Heroku and AWS. Particular attention paid to very high test coverage and security and encryption.
• Developed product roadmap with non-technical founder to support product, customer and fundraising milestones.
• Implemented light weight agile process in Jira to support offshore developer.
• Researched and proposed AI and NLP driven features.

IkonoTV is a Berlin based art video company which broadcasts a 24 / 7 stream and provides a large and diverse catalog of on demand content. After six months as a Twivel customer IkonoTV engaged me as an interim CTO to help them with a range of technology opportunities and problems.

As part of my work with them I helped migrate the organisation on to Google Apps, assess the SmartTV technology landscape and create a 24 month technology and roadmap.

IkonoTV sponsored the development of a React based web app and payments and subscriptions for Twivel.

• Ran research and vendor selection process for video hosting, transcoding and streaming.
• Planned out tech and product roadmap covering rollout to Smart TVs, payments and subscriptions and analytics to power revenue share based on view count.
• Developed React based web app which consumed Twivel API.

Earthport is a rapidly growing fintech business that needed a information management system to help scale the business. I acted as a business analyst, developer and project manager to run a fully agile process. I worked with all departments in the business to analyse, document and build features.

The majority of the work involved creating the complex data model, migrating content from legacy databases and creating various interfaces for creating and consuming the content.

• Worked with subject matter experts to analyse, design and implement a complex content model covering country and partner bank capabilities.
• Migrated content from several disparate sources into Drupal.
• Implemented a peer review workflow.
• Managed a full agile delivery process.

I designed and built a publishing platform for the Economist’s daily news app, Espresso. Worked with editorial and technical stakeholders to create user stories, run an agile development process and develop the backend functionality. The CMS integrated with finance APIs to pull in financial data and also acted as the end point for a freestanding app. Used Pantheon and AWS to create a robust infrastructure that support hundreds of thousands of daily downloads. This project was undertaken as part of a team during my time at Cameron & Wilding.

• Ran agile process, directly liaising with senior editorial staff and technical product manager.
• Worked in co-location with iOS and Android dev teams.
• Publishing platform supports three global editorial teams creating content around the clock.
• The final API supports multiple end points for content, advertisements and financial data.

Architected, project managed and acted as tech lead on five person project over 9 months to develop an advanced intranet for finance professionals to log M&A deals, work collaboratively and identify experts to work on new deals. Project involved data migration, data sanitisation, advanced apache solr and rich javascript interfaces. This project was undertaken as part of a team during my time at Cameron & Wilding.

• Apache Solr powered deal finder for $75bn worth of deals.
• 600 professionals across 40 self managed groups (created with Organic Groups).
• Interactive Special Interest Groups for sharing news and documents.
• Dynamic PDF deal certificate generator.