CV

Engineering Leader · Agile Coach · Software Craftsmanship

Remote (UK/Ireland)

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Overview

Engineering Manager and systems thinker who thrives with high-leverage, often invisible work: the career ladders engineers actually use, the incident processes that hold under pressure, the agile transformations that cut cycle time. Most recently scaled a mission-driven EdTech organisation from 2 to 8 teams by designing the structures, feedback loops, and delivery practices that made sustainable growth possible. Brings 20+ years of technical foundation and a coaching-led style that has consistently produced internal promotions.

Recent Accomplishments

  • Scaled an engineering department from 2 to 8 teams, hiring 15+ permanent and 10+ contract engineers in under two years
  • Built Oak National Academy's first Incident Management process, reducing MTTR to under 3 hours
  • Drove Agile transformation reducing average cycle time from 6 days to under 4 days across 8 teams
  • Designed and launched an Engineering Career Ladder, Skills Matrix, and Sustainable Development framework
  • Pioneered AI-assisted engineering practices including custom GPT development adopted by HR for pay progression
  • Increased automated test coverage from near-zero to 40%+ across platforms while embedding TDD practices
  • Delivered 3 large-scale legacy migrations covering 2M+ user records with zero downtime
  • Coached and mentored engineers to 5 internal promotions and 4 significant internal moves across two roles
  • Managed 7-figure engineering budget

Core Competencies

  • Engineering Leadership & Org Design
  • Agile Coaching (Kanban, Scrum, SAFe, LeSS, Hoshin Planning)
  • Career Development & Mentoring
  • Delivery, Reliability & Incident Management
  • Test-Driven Development & Quality Culture
  • AI-Assisted Engineering Practices
  • Cloud-Native Architecture & CI/CD
  • Hiring, Budgeting & Organisational Scaling

Professional Experience

Oak National Academy — Software Engineering Manager

Feb 2023 – Present · Remote

Oak is a government-backed EdTech non-profit providing free, high-quality curriculum resources to schools across the UK. I joined as the first engineering management hire at a pivotal moment — the organisation was scaling rapidly and needed someone to build the structures, standards, and people practices that would make that growth sustainable.

This wasn't a role where the foundations already existed. The career ladder, incident process, onboarding framework, platform team, and agile ways of working were all built from scratch. The challenge was doing all of that while keeping delivery moving across a growing number of teams and a mission that genuinely matters.

Scope: 8 teams · 30+ engineers · 7-figure budget · GCP · Postgres · GraphQL · Vercel · Next.js · React · TypeScript

Key achievements

  • Hired 15+ permanent and 10+ contract engineers to scale the department from 2 to 8 teams — including 7 contractors placed across teams within a two-month window
  • Built Oak's Incident Management process, reducing MTTR to under 3 hours
  • Drove Agile transformation across engineering and the wider organisation, reducing average cycle time from 6 to under 4 days
  • Designed and launched the Engineering Career Ladder, Skills Matrix, onboarding/offboarding process, and Sustainable Development framework — creating transparent, consistent foundations for engineer growth
  • Led the creation of Oak's first Platform Team, including its ways of working and technical charter
  • Pioneered AI-assisted engineering practices including a custom GPT tool adopted by HR for pay progression
  • Coached and mentored engineers at all levels — resulting in 4 promotions (including junior → mid and senior → principal) and 4 significant internal moves
  • Managed the 7-figure engineering budget and contributed to department-wide strategic planning

Flipdish — Software Engineering Manager II

Feb 2021 – Nov 2022 · Remote

Flipdish is a FoodTech unicorn powering ordering and operations for restaurant brands globally. I led the Mobile and Web end-user experience teams — the products directly responsible for approximately 93% of company revenue. The team was cross-functional, spanning iOS, Android, Web, backend, QA, and build engineering, and the scale of the mobile offering — over 100 whitelabel apps — meant that any quality or release problem had immediate, visible commercial impact.

The work here was about raising the floor. Test coverage was near-zero on several platforms, release pipelines were largely manual, and the codebase carried significant technical debt. Building a quality culture in that environment, without slowing delivery, required both technical credibility and a sustained coaching effort with the team.

Scope: 10+ engineers · iOS · Android · Web · React · Next.js · Java · Kotlin · Swift · WebDriverIO · Fastlane · Azure DevOps

Key achievements

  • Transformed testing culture across all platforms: Android 2% → 16%, iOS 25% → 40%, Web ~1% → 40%
  • Built end-to-end UI automation using WebDriverIO, achieving 100% Smoke test coverage across Web, iOS, and Android — a capability that did not exist on joining
  • Drove automation of mobile release pipelines using Fastlane and Azure DevOps, transforming a manual per-app process into bulk automated deploys across 100+ whitelabel apps
  • Led the complete redesign of the Web Ordering application — the primary customer-facing product across Flipdish's client base
  • Created a Dynamic Address API enabling expansion into new international markets, adopted across the full Flipdish product suite
  • Introduced D&I workshops and spoke at the Flipdish Annual Conference
  • Co-created the engineering career ladder alongside the broader engineering leadership team
  • Achieved 3 internal promotions through structured coaching and career development programmes

Mastercard — Director of Engineering

Jan 2020 – Feb 2021 · Dublin

Led Consumer Lifecycle and Consumer Card Services — internal PII/PCI-compliant platforms providing secure, scalable data storage and RESTful API access for Mastercard's consumer products. The primary challenge of this role was delivering a complex, compliance-heavy migration programme while building team culture entirely from a remote location — something that required deliberate effort given the security-sensitive nature of the codebase and the distributed nature of the team.

Scope: 10+ engineers · Java · Spring Boot · MongoDB · Pivotal Cloud Foundry · AES Encryption

Key achievements

  • Led 3 major customer migrations from legacy systems to the new platform, moving 2M+ user records with zero downtime and on schedule
  • Delivered a secure, scalable RESTful API solution with AES encryption underpinning Mastercard's Consumer Lifecycle services
  • Drove a test-first engineering culture across the team, raising quality standards on a security-critical, compliance-heavy codebase
  • Delivered significant build and release pipeline improvements — reducing build times, introducing automated test gates, and enabling automated deployments
  • Built a cohesive, high-performing team culture while leading entirely from a remote location

Verizon Connect — Software Development Manager

Jul 2018 – Jan 2020 · Dublin

Promoted into engineering management to lead the mobile and API teams for Field Service Dispatch (FSD) — a greenfield product built to help field service organisations manage their workforce in real time. I built the team, the culture, and the delivery process from scratch, scaling from 6 to 22 engineers in five months while keeping quality and autonomy as non-negotiables.

The FSD story is one I'm proud of. The app shipped on time, rated 4.8/5, and the team were trusted to run the full market launch without any management involvement. That level of autonomy doesn't happen by accident — it's the result of deliberate hiring, coaching, clear principles, and giving engineers genuine ownership of their work.

Scope: 3 cross-functional teams · 22 engineers · Java · Kotlin · Swift · AWS

Key achievements

  • Scaled the team from 6 to 22 direct reports in 5 months, organising into three cross-functional teams each with a lead engineer
  • Delivered the FSD app on time with a 4.8/5 store rating and 90%+ test coverage across all apps and backend services
  • Established a green board policy as a cultural cornerstone — zero tolerance for unresolved CI failures, creating a shared quality standard the team owned and enforced themselves
  • Built a genuinely autonomous team culture — giving engineers full ownership of architecture and technical decisions, resulting in the team handling the full market launch without any management involvement
  • Embedded engineering best practices from scratch: Kanban, TDD, CI/CD, automated testing, and instrumentation across all apps and backend services
  • Contributed to Hoshin planning at the management level, helping the team define and track KPIs aligned to company-wide strategic goals

Earlier Experience

  • Android Squad Lead — Verizon Connect (2017–2018)
  • Android Technical Lead — Daft Media Ltd. (2014–2017)
  • Senior Android Developer — AOL Global Ltd. (2011–2014)
  • Android Developer — JTribe Ltd. (2010–2011)
  • Software Developer — Anam Technologies Ltd. (2005–2010)

Education & Certifications

  • M.Sc. Computer Science (Networks & Distributed Systems) — Trinity College Dublin
  • B.A. Mod. Information & Communications Technology — Trinity College Dublin
  • Diploma in New Product Development Project Management — Fitzwilliam Institute
  • ICAgile: Agile Foundations · Team Facilitation · Agile Coaching
  • Mindstream: Life Coach Certification

Writing & Media

  • Rules for Software Development — Author (Amazon, 2024)
  • The Rules of Software Development — Podcast Host
  • D&I Panel Speaker