Technical consultancy (tech-stack / architecture, data pipelines & software development), team building, and full-stack implementation for various early-stage (pre-Seed, Seed & Series A) startups.* 1st party data pipeline and bespoke conversational ecommerce platform design and build for Series A stage omnichannel brand; recruitment, onboarding & mentoring of data and engineering teams* E-commerce & tech strategy for CPG DTC startup* Tech Roadmap for a PropTech startup* Full-stack development of a conversational, community-orientated, e-commerce platform for an innovative womenswear brand (Pusher Chatkit, MaterialUI/React/Redux, Rails, MongoDB & Neo4J).* Working with a founder/CEO to design a predictive manufacturing system. * E-commerce strategy & tech stack consultancy with a new DTC kitchenware brand.* Mobile app consultancy & API development for a Premier League football team.

A highly regarded UK market leader, Sweaty Betty entered a period of hyper-growth in early 2020, leading to its $410m acquisition by Wolverine Worldwide in mid-2021. Originally a bootstrapped business, the management team recognised the need to invest in its technology function to support current trading levels as well as to accelerate international expansion. A new CTO had joined the business around the time of the acquisition and established an agile, portfolio-based approach to digital product management. To build on this improved approach, I was brought in on an interim basis to develop and implement an ITSM-based Service Operating Model that was capable of meeting the needs of digital product teams across the portfolio, without compromising on the ongoing delivery and support of effective, reliable and performant systems that underpin trading across three continents. This required me to originate, restructure and/or improve internal & vendor-supplied capabilities across:* Software & Application Engineering* Quality Engineering* Application Support * Observability & SRE * DevOps / Cloud Infrastructure Well-supported by an able and dedicated IT leadership team, and utilising a mix of team restructuring, fresh hiring (both permanent and contract-based), onboarding new technologies, and greatly improved ways of working, Sweaty Betty is now even better equipped to handle the challenges of establishing itself as an international DTC leader.

CTO at a venture-backed CPG brand. As the second hire into the senior leadership team, I worked closely with the founders to grow the company from a bootstrapped team of twelve to a VC-scale business (60+) in little over a year. Contributing across aspects of scaling-up, including operational process / organisational design across all functions and building three-statement models for financial forecasting, I played a key role in the recruitment and onboarding of a high quality team (incl. hires from Transferwise, AirBnB, Tinder & Manual) capable of growing the business in multiple territories (UK, EU, US) and across multiple channels (online, wholesale, direct retail). Additionally, I was responsible for:* Growing e-commerce revenue from £485K to a ~£4m RR in less than six months * Implementing a multi-currency, multi-geo, multi-entity ecommerce platform (‘headless’ Shopify Plus)* Designing a custom front-end (VueJS, Algolia, Contentful, Cloudinary, Netlify) with various bespoke user interface concepts (chat, quizzes, video consultations, etc)* Leading on a rapid development project at the start of “Lockdown 1” to launch a series of live virtual “Hair Parties” hosted by Nick Grimshaw and attended (via video) by the likes of Masie Williams and Georgia May Jagger. Tens of thousands of fans in over sixty countries joined in the fun via moderated real-time chat (VueJS, Wowza, Pusher, Google Firebase, Rails, Heroku, Netlify, Zoom)* Designing and developing a bespoke middleware app (Rails, PostgreSQL, Heroku, AWS) to enable routing of orders to multiple distribution centres in multiple geographies, with SAP by Design as the underlying ERP * Architecting an event-driven data pipeline and BI toolchain (Snowplow, Stitch, Google Big Query, dbt, Census, Looker) and rolling it out across all key business functions

CTO at venture-backed DTC startup, providing technical leadership, e-commerce strategy, and mentoring/coaching of functional heads across the business.* Design and build of a real-time data collection and analytics pipeline integrated into an event-driven e-commerce platform.* Development of a technical assessment framework for 3PL tender and led negotiations with key suppliers, achieving six-figure cost savings.* Recruited and led a data science team to build predictive, campaign-level customer acquisition and ad-automation software. * Led a project to define a data-driven physical product design and manufacturing process & sourced VP of Innovation to lead implementation.

Reporting to the global CEO as the most senior technical employee within Madras Global, a 1000+ person company, now part of Deloitte Digital. Based in the UK, and working across sites in New York, Chennai and Bangalore.* Architecting innovative technical solutions and providing high-level technical consulting.* Technical roadmap development for AI-based creative services automation, a Programmatic Advertising platform, and a Big Data Analytics system.* Developed back-end services using Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, etc.* All aspects of recruitment, training and performance management of a large team of software engineers across two locations, which included three months spent on-site in India.* Coaching and mentoring of engineers, team leads and managers; providing technical and product consulting for startups funded by a corporate venture arm.Notable projects included:* New Look - System design for a physical ‘selfie booth’ to compliment a Snapchat campaign (which involved hooking up multiple DSLRs, real-time image processing, video compositing and various social media integrations). Developed various back-end and deployment services using JS, Rails and Sinatra.* Macy’s – Developed a video-commerce app using MeteorJS, Angular and Apache Cordova.* BBC CUI (Conversational User Interfaces) - Development and facilitation of CUI workshops and creation of technical proofs-of-concept (Ruby, JS/wit.ai and Slack).*Sonos - Authored a technical roadmap for launching the BBC as a provider on Sonos.* SaaS Workflow & AdTech Platform - Advising on the re-architecting of a large workflow and AdTech SaaS solution, including a strategy to pay-down eight years of technical debt.* AWS Migration - Transition plan for the successful migration of a large SaaS solution onto AWS.

Responsible for technology selection, system architecture, and back-end implementation of web and mobile applications for global brands in the leisure and retail sectors.Somewhat_ was acquired by Madras Brand Solutions.

Raised a £750k seed. Seedcamp London finalists.StorkUp was an online marketplace for baby and kids products. Our mission was to give outstanding independent merchants the attention and sales that they deserve. Several hundred of the best online baby and kids’ shops from across the world sold on StorkUp.The platform offered a universal cart, enabling customers to buy from all their favourite merchants and boutiques via a single easy-to-use, secure, online checkout.

I worked on a variety of technical consulting and programming projects across the ecommerce and affiliate marketing space, from online channel development for a leading high street brand, to various affiliate marketing and price comparison new build projects.

From a standing start in 2005, Beautysleuth became one of the fastest-growing online retailers in the UK with a customer base in excess of 250,000 and turnover of over £7m-a-year. Acquired in 2008 by Lookfantastic (part of the Hut Group Ltd).

Working as Microsoft Certified Partners with the (then newly-released) .NET stack, we delivered projects for clients including Royal Bank of Scotland, Goodpractice.com, Angus Council, Glasgow City Council, and Bank of Scotland Corporate. NKD was also awarded Scottish Enterprise grant funding to undertake experimental work in making the web a “writeable” place for users which was carried out between 2002 – 2003.