Welcome to my site and blog. You can find out about me and read my thoughts on code and technology, start-ups and building things.
Welcome to my site and blog. You can find out about me and read my thoughts on code and technology, start-ups and building things.
Platform Eight is a consultancy providing virtual CTO, technical and investment support services to early-stage companies. My clients are US and UK based funds and their portfolio companies.
I am presently overseeing the development of four products and acting as CTO or advisor to five pre-series A companies.
Open Energy Market developed technology that allowed businesses to buy commercial energy. During my tenure, we grew from a start-up to the 13th largest commercial energy broker in the UK. The technology that I architected was the first supplier independent trading platform, it replaced the offline, spreadsheet-based, trading process customers had to endure and provided unrivalled forecasting and analytical tools within the market.
In my role, I was responsible for Open Energy Market's products and technology. This covered the architecture and development of the companies trading platform. It also covered internal systems, security, compliance, infrastructure and training. I built a core Devops team of 15 which was fully remote and based across multiple timezones. I managed many key relationships with vendors and ran multiple RFT processes. This included instances where the relationship had to be terminated. Through my relentless delivery, I helped Open Energy Market to trade contracts for over 250 clients.
Besides my technical responsibilities at Open Energy Market, I helped to grow the business through my role on the board. This involved defining strategy, navigating legal responsibilities and securing funding. I gained significant exposure to fundraising and working with Private Equity investors.
ControlPoint provided incident and crisis management software to regulated industries. I joined as the fourth employee to turn an inhouse developed product into a viable SaaS business. Within two years the software had been adopted by leading brands such as BP, Easyjet and Maersk, this led to the company's acquisition by the market leader, One Voice, in 2015.
In my role, I led the engineering team and devised the architecture used to scale the application. Reporting to the parent group's CTO I expanded the technical team to seven and rolled out an agile-based development process and its supporting software. I worked closely with clients to develop custom workflows and functionality.
During my time at AI, I was asked to architect two projects won by the parent group. The first was a platform to manage flight crews for Easyjet. This system provided two-way communication with the crews via SMS. The second was a notification engine for the group's applications to use. This provided email, SMS, text to voice and push notifications.
Konetic recruited me in 2007 to build a complete recruitment SaaS platform for large scale, global recruitment. At this point, they had built 5 web applications for clients such as Deutsche Bank and Microsoft. My remit was to design and develop a single platform in partnership with the technical director. It needed to support various client workflows and requirements and link all stakeholders in the recruitment process.
By the end of my 5 years with the company, we had over 45 direct clients and several white label partnership deals. I had helped to grow the core development team to 7 and establish a QA team and product management team.
My role at Liberata saw me lead a team developing an Employee Benefits Management system. Built upon .Net and SQL server, we utilised a lot of the early .Net framework to develop a configurable, multi-tenanted SaaS platform. The platform supported client-specific branding and functionality on top of the core platform. During my tenure, we expanded our client base five-fold and I scaled the technical team to six.
I spent my time with HSBC developing Visual Basic 6 and SQL Server 7 based desktop applications and system programming Profund (a pensions administration system).
I worked as a Profund Systems Developer developing Pension calculations and integrating Microsoft Office applications with the Profund system.