Can we work together?

I’m looking for my next role in engineering leadership: running a backend team while staying hands-on in design and code.

Right now I lead a team of six engineers, setting the team’s technical direction and coordinating delivery with teams across the business. I’ve spent a decade at the same company, starting as a junior developer and working up through senior developer to team lead, so I’m as comfortable looking after a large legacy estate as I am building new services from scratch.

What I bring

• Leadership: planning, prioritisation and delivery, and growing engineers through mentoring and regular 1:1s.
• Backend Java: Java 8 through 21 with Spring and Jakarta CDI, from long-lived legacy systems to brand new services.
• Security and PKI: I’ve run an X.509 certificate authority, rolled out modern TLS and HSTS, and championed modern cryptography, including an end-to-end encrypted file transfer service.
• Cloud: services on Google Cloud, with Kubernetes workloads and BigQuery for reporting.
• AI-first engineering: I build agents, skills and workflows that take on routine engineering work, while design, architecture and quality gating stay human-led. Leading my team’s adoption of AI coding assistants made a big day-to-day difference, especially for our junior engineers.

Outside work I write Go. Grid Monitor is a live dashboard for the UK National Grid, and my homelab is a 14-host fleet managed entirely as code. There’s more on the projects page.

If that sounds like a fit, drop me an email. My CV and references are available on request.