organisations

over a decade of data-intensive distributed systems across emea and na.

reality defender · new york · 2024 to now · tech lead

reality defender detects deepfakes for banks and governments. i built the data platform its models train on, from nothing: 100 mb/s in, over 100 million rows a second. i made our data access 1,575x faster than databricks’ own drivers and published how. i serve a 100 tb warehouse to the ml team as plain rest endpoints.

i lead by example. i outpace everyone regardless of whether they are using bots. my work merges because it is correct. i raise the bar and teach people to be as good as i am at my job. i also own development for on prem.

stage.tech (Buma Stemra) · united kingdom · 2023 to 2024 · senior software engineer (contract)

a royalty distribution platform for buma stemra, one of our direct funders. the project was two years in with 13% project completion. it was in the red and project failure was imminent.

i knuckled down as a contractor. i motivated an unmotivated team. i planned and organised tasks, and brought project completion to 55% in my first month. i wrote a badass scd type 2 auditing system along the way. we succeeded, 100%.

mucoaid (Berlin Institute of Health) · berlin · 2023 · lead platform engineer (contract)

an ml platform that improves physicians’ detection of oral cancer by 80%. i directed its engineering under contract.

the pipeline was straightforward. i mainly brought tests and a test-driven culture to a team that had none and moved everything to soc2 and hipaa compliant, resilient and secure infrastructure. medicine does not tolerate mistakes, so neither did we.

unweave.io · berlin · 2023 · platform engineer (contract)

gpus at scale for any ml team, on their own cloud. i shipped four features in a month, in the open on github.

i massively improved the user experience: data transfers 75% faster, through compression. it was my first step from data into mlops. it was fun.

geneva (Bumble) · new york · 2019 to 2022 · founding platform engineer

a messaging app for finding your people around a shared interest. i raised it completely from conception. i owned the go and data function: messages in 10 ms, load-tested to 3 million people connected at once. the engineering team grew from 7 to 50. bumble bought it and rebuilt its entire backend on it.

i learned everything there is to know about taking a startup from an idea to a series b: the tech, the people, the legal. i learned that i can fight to the fucking death for a product i believe in. at the end of my journey, we had grown that concept to 100,000 daily active users.

the oakland group (Vodafone) · leeds · 2019 · data engineer

vodafone was moving off its legacy data warehouses, and its shop floor ran on disconnected data marts. i was the data engineer on the pilot.

i centralised the marts into one delivery pipeline: 300 million rows a day, every row accounted for, delivered in two weeks. i learned petabyte-scale data migrations and pipelines under the pressure of the giants of the telecommunications industry, from some of the best.

rhea group · oxford · 2018 to 2019 · software engineer

an early warning system that tells uganda’s farmers when drought or flood is coming. the european space agency funded it at £127 million. i owned the backend on a team of five: 114 gb of satellite data a month, weather sources at 4 gb/s, maps on the screen in 25 ms.

i came out knowing satellite and geospatial networks and systems in and out.

emis health · leeds · 2015 to 2016 · technical support consultant

emis supplies the clinical systems most gp practices in england and wales run on. i wrote the sql that configured their deployment. it had to be fast, because the systems could not be slow.

i learned everything there is to know about relational databases at nhs scale.

dxc (Hewlett Packard Enterprise) · washington · 2013 · sre tooling (contract)

network engineers were configuring data centre switches by hand. i wrote a python tool that did it for them, across 200 switches. it saved 18 engineer-days a month.

it was my first product as a contractor and i picked up network engineering for estates along the way.