Curriculum vitae

Jul 2026 – present

Staff Engineer, Engineering Lead Core AI Platform at Photoroom (AI & e-commerce)

• Designing and building the no-code, self-service platform that enables Photoroom teams to define, test, and launch generative-AI tools.
• Key projects: MCP server, enabling AI assistants to use its image-editing tools; resilient asynchronous execution for long-running AI generations; granular model-cost attribution, analytics, and controls; and AI-safety and content-provenance infrastructure, including child-safety safeguards, C2PA Content Credentials, and imperceptible watermarking.
• Manage three direct reports and lead Photoroom’s Backend Guild, setting engineering standards and best practices and promoting knowledge-sharing across all backend engineers.

Dec 2024 – Jul 2026

Staff Engineer, Head of Backend at Photoroom (AI & e-commerce)

• A hands-on (65% IC) role responsible for Photoroom’s Django and FastAPI backend (2,500 requests per second, 10TB database) and managed 4 direct reports.
• Oversaw FastAPI AI gateway, handling frontend requests to internal and external AI endpoints, including model fallbacks, rate limiting, abuse prevention, enriching requests, and more to ensure safe and reliable model use at scale.
• Expanded our system monitoring (anomalies, SLOs, error rates) to improve incident detection and response times.
• Led migration to Kubernetes, zero-downtime deployments (including data migrations), introduced automated deployments and a testing environment for client developers to use.
• Tech lead for cross-platform (Android, backend, iOS, and web) redesign of our billing system to closely align users’ AI usage with the subscription fees.
• Built an agentic coding pipeline with structured evaluation, delivering 70–90% of merged PRs per week. An increasing majority merged without human review thanks to reference files, and deterministic checks. Pipeline monitored (incl. chain-of-thought) for optimisation.

Aug 2022 – Oct 2024

Staff Engineer at Lantum (healthcare & finance)

• Planned, led, and worked on the refactor of the entire backend (Python/Django), reducing complexity, upgrading libraries, hardening security, and enabling new features.
• Oversaw tech support and incident response; trained the team, established reporting systems and built better monitoring and logs. Resulted in reducing exposure of feature squads from 25% of their time to less than 1%, and reduced developer churn.
• Established and evangelised software processes, patterns, and ways of working.

Jul 2021 – Jul 2022

Technical Director (CTO) at TrackTrack (legal tech)

• Transformed the software architecture, infrastructure, team, and software development processes to allow rapid growth in clients. Some clients required on-prem deployments of our product inside their DMZ.

Nov 2019 – Jun 2021

Consulting Software Engineer & Architect at European Public Affairs Technologies (consulting)

• Tech Lead in five successfully delivered projects. I guided clients on the best architecture for their needs, budgets, and maturity levels. I prepared documentation, wrote software, and performed code reviews. Notable projects included:

Jun 2016 – Dec 2019

Backend Python/Django Engineer at European Public Affairs Technologies (media & policy)

• Built a content sharing platform for EU policymakers and a tool for lobbyists that compiled all the publicly available data on EU politicians.

Savin Hood Tax Calculator

Built a UK income tax calculator to help navigate the 100k tax trap.

Zero Downtime Migrations

PostgreSQL migration safety linter for Alembic, Django, and Tortoise.