About Me

Software engineer with 19 years of experience in software design and development. Delivered solutions for global brands, digital agencies, startups, and charities. Led the delivery of reliable software and helped teams improve quality, productivity, and technical standards.

Strong advocate for modern software architecture. Focuses on simple systems, high performance, cost-effective solutions, scalable platforms, and an efficient developer experience.

As AI reduces the cost of writing code, my value is in technical strategy, software design, and architecture. I focus on long-term decisions, clear system design, and maintainable code. I treat code quality as a long-term investment that reduces risk and supports future development.

Reduced long-term engineering cost through technical strategy, software architecture, and AI engineering. Designing systems that remain simple to maintain as products, teams, and business requirements grow.
Increased delivery speed and engineering consistency through feature-driven architecture, contract-first development, reusable design systems, and clear engineering standards. Creating platforms where every change has one clear place and one clear pattern.
Reduced defects and review effort by shifting quality checks earlier in the development process. Use strong type safety, automated testing, static analysis, code generation, and CI/CD to detect problems before peer review and deployment.
Enabled engineers to use AI effectively by defining documented architecture, repeatable workflows, and automated quality gates. Create development environments where engineers and AI assistants produce consistent, maintainable code by default.
Improved developer experience and reduced onboarding time through clear boundaries, documented design decisions (ADR), reusable tooling, and automation. Build engineering platforms that allow teams to deliver reliable software with confidence over the lifetime of a product.

Core competencies —

Technical leadership
Continuous learning
Problem-solving
Big picture thinking
Communication

Experience —

March 2025 - Present (1yr 7mos)

House of Doge — Principal Software Engineer

Architected and built the engineering foundation for a greenfield React Native platform, defining the technical strategy, architecture, and systems that scaled development across the team. Designed a feature-oriented monorepo with contract-first protobuf APIs, strict architectural boundaries, and end-to-end type safety to enable parallel feature delivery without architectural drift. Established repository-specific AI agent skills and shared engineering conventions, and initiated the ADRs and domain documentation, that enabled both engineers and LLM agents to contribute safely within well-defined architectural constraints. Implemented automated quality gates for both human and agent authored code, alongside CI/CD pipelines, testing standards, and cognitive complexity budgets that preserved correctness, architectural integrity, and development velocity as the platform scaled.

Key achievements

Built the platform architecture.
Integrated agent engineering workflows.
Established a token-driven design system, keeping alignment with Figma and enabled consistent UI development at scale.

July 2023 - March 2025 (1yr 9mos)

OneTwo — Technical Lead

OneTwo develops the automation platform for ANZ Australia that unifies fragmented banking systems into a single workflow, automating home loan processing through document intelligence, workflow orchestration, and human-in-the-loop decisioning.

Led one of four engineering teams while providing technical leadership across software architecture, engineering standards, and platform delivery. Defined architectural direction that improved maintainability, enabled reliable delivery across teams, and supported continued product growth.

Served as code owner for several critical platform components, including the inherited core rules engine, maintaining architectural integrity, reducing technical debt, and coordinating cross-team changes across shared services and platform dependencies.

Designed and delivered architecture spanning the customer-facing application, shared component library, home loan workflows, a human-readable DSL for business rules, CoreEngine APIs, domain services including RLS and RLM enrichment, and integrations with internal banking systems and Q, the adjacent document-intelligence platform. Work inside Q was limited to minor Python plugin changes for HLQ integration; its document-intelligence internals belonged to another team. Established clear service boundaries, reusable platform capabilities, and well-defined interfaces that reduced implementation complexity and enabled the platform to evolve safely as new products and workflows were introduced.

Key achievements

Led technical direction for one of four engineering teams.
Architected major platform components across customer applications, workflow orchestration, APIs, and banking integrations.
Reduced technical debt and improved platform maintainability through architectural governance and shared engineering standards.

October 2021 - July 2023 (1yr 10mos)

GetSetUp — Lead Software Engineer

GetSetUp operates a large-scale educational platform supporting over 4 million users via a distributed microservices ecosystem. The architecture handles live interactive sessions, content orchestration, subscription models, and embedded partner integrations to facilitate real-time engagement at scale.

Architected and developed key components of a cloud-native microservices environment, delivering services for content management, session scheduling, and GraphQL-based APIs. Collaborated with technical leadership to refine platform strategy, enhance engineering workflows, and transition legacy monolithic systems into modular, independently deployable services that improved overall system agility.

Acted as technical lead and code owner for several core services, establishing architectural standards and ensuring high-quality software delivery.

Key achievements

Designed and delivered core services that powered content management, live learning, and partner experiences across the GetSetUp platform.
Delivered the GetSetUp Embedded platform, enabling enterprise partners including AOL to integrate GetSetUp’s learning experience into their own products.
Drove technical quality across multiple critical services as code owner, improving maintainability, architectural consistency, and engineering standards.

May 2021 - October 2021 (6mos)

General Studios — Head of Technology

Helped systemise the agency’s software development and DevOps practices by introducing processes that improved delivery, development workflows, and resource utilisation. Led the adoption of new technologies and contributed to technical hiring, resource planning, and engineering direction across multiple client projects.

DDB New Zealand

November 2019 - May 2021 (1yr 7mos)

Head of Technology

February 2016 - November 2019 (3yrs 10mos)

Tech Lead

Provided technical leadership across DDB’s digital engineering practice, leading the delivery of award-winning digital products, modernising technology stacks, and contributing to the development of DDB-owned SaaS products. Delivered large-scale digital platforms for commercial, government, and enterprise clients while helping establish DDB as a trusted engineering partner for technically complex projects.

Key achievements

Led engineering for multiple award-winning digital platforms, contributing to campaigns recognised with 11 Effie Awards, Best Design Awards, CSS Design Awards, and the New Zealand Fraud Film Festival.
Modernised DDB’s engineering capability through the adoption of contemporary web technologies, cloud-native architectures, and improved development practices.
Designed and delivered digital platforms and SaaS products for commercial, government, and enterprise clients.

March 2014 - February 2016 (2yrs)

Buzzdial — Full Stack Engineer

Buzzdial built a platform for measuring real-time audience sentiment during live television. I helped establish the technology stack and built a platform that handled hundreds of thousands of concurrent users, used for the 2015 UK ITV Leaders Debate, Shark Tank Australia, SBS Eurovision, and the 2015 Rugby Championship.

January 2010 - February 2014 (4yrs 2mos)

Digital Arts Network — Full Stack Engineer

My main project was TVNZ OnDemand's phone and tablet apps for Apple and Android, built with Brightcove, a Boston-based streaming partner. The iOS and Android apps reached the top of their app store charts soon after launch and won multiple Best Awards.

I also led the build of myWealth, a wealth management and planning tool for NZ Funds. It won a Best Award.

September 2009 - January 2010 (5mos)

National College of Design and Technology — Tutor / Speaker

Taught CSS fundamentals and CMS Made Simple during a Head of Department transition.

July 2007 - April 2009 (1yr 10mos)

The Web Company — Full Stack Engineer

End-to-end delivery of brochure sites, content-managed websites, and e-commerce builds in PHP and JavaScript, from client services, planning and design through development and hosting.

Recognition —

Local and international industry awards, including Cannes Lions, The Webby Awards, D&AD, The One Show, Effie Awards, WARC Awards, CSS Design Awards, Awwwards, FWA, Spikes Asia, Axis Awards, Best Awards, and The Mashies.