Full-stack Ruby on Rails engineer with 20+ years of whole-product ownership, from first customer conversation to long-term production. Highlights range from live-event systems serving over a million visits a day to a business-critical platform in production for 13 years. More than 20 Rails applications shipped to production for long-standing clients along the way. Usually two engagements at a time, always joining to stay.
Deep Rails, with extensive LLM pipeline work. Comfortable owning the full stack and taking responsibility for the reliability of the code I ship. Agentic engineering is now central to how I work, driving coding agents under strict SDLC guardrails to produce clean, maintainable, well-tested and reliable code.
Full-Stack Rails Engineer
Environmentjob.co.uk (Contract)
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The UK's leading environmental jobs platform
- Long-running retained contract, held alongside other client work since 2013.
- Build and maintain systems for job search, advertiser and job-seeker tools, admin workflow, CRM and reporting. Changes ship in days and stay in production for years.
- Designed the data model and built Elasticsearch full-text search, faceted filtering and an email alert system sending over 150k emails/week.
- Built AI import, clean-up and classification systems.
- Built a software tool for monitoring relevant new job postings across hundreds of websites, later spun out as its own SaaS.
- Full maintenance and upgrade journey from Rails 1 to Rails 8.
2013 - Present
Founder & Rails Engineer
Changeflow
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Bootstrapped AI-powered website monitoring and alerting SaaS, used by Am Law 200 firms
- Founded, built and operate a production Rails SaaS for website monitoring, change detection and customer alerting.
- Designed the core data model, monitoring pipeline, background jobs and notification workflows end to end.
- Integrated Puppeteer/Node.js browser automation with Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis and Faktory/Sidekiq.
- Built LLM pipelines for classification, summarisation and cleaning, plus an in-app AI agent.
- Owned the full lifecycle, from deployment through production reliability to customer support.
- Now a stable, lightly maintained side product rather than an active venture.
2023 - 2026
Full-Stack Rails Engineer
LEX (Contract)
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Engineering for NTT DATA's global sports sponsorships
- Delivered time-critical data-ingestion and visualisation systems for NTT DATA sponsorships including The Open, Tour de France, BMW International Open and Indy 500, ingesting GPS, timing, weather and scoring feeds over Kafka, WebSockets and XML.
- Built ShotView, live 3D shot tracking in Three.js for The Open's website, taken from creative concept to over 1 million visits a day within 4 months; won Best Use of Technology at the Sports Industry Awards 2023.
- Rebuilt the NTT DataWall as a 30-metre 3D visualisation synced with the live broadcast, using real-time OCR of the feed and ActionCable to put matching player and hole analysis on screen within milliseconds.
- Led a small team of software engineers within a wider multidisciplinary team of creative directors, designers and producers, owning coding standards, automated testing and code review.
2019 - 2023
Full-Stack Rails Engineer
Retechnica (Contract)
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AI firm; engaged to deliver a medical analytics platform
- Built a medical voice-of-customer analytics platform for GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), with data exploration, interactive visualisation and PDF/PPT reporting exports.
- Shipped on time and on budget with a 9/10 satisfaction score from 50+ stakeholders.
2019
Full-Stack Rails Engineer
Pulse Group (Contract)
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Digital agency delivering live data experiences for global brands
- Developed the first generation of NTT DATA's live onsite data experiences and event websites in Rails, JavaScript and D3.js for The Open Championship.
- Delivered large-format live data screens for Team GB at the Olympic Games.
- Built Rails reporting tools, touch-screen interactives and a Cordova mobile events app for Emirates Airline.
- Recruited and managed other engineers as projects required, reviewing every pull request and running estimation and delivery against fixed event dates.
2013 - 2018
Founder & Rails Engineer
Flumes
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Social media analytics and visualisation platform, founded and built 0 to 1
- Built a social media analytics platform from scratch, covering live social data ingestion, enrichment and interactive visualisation.
- Enriched social data with sentiment, gender, age and geolocation classification by integrating third-party APIs.
2010 - 2013
Full-Stack Rails Engineer
AlphaSights
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Information-services & advisory firm, Cambridge/London
- Joined as first employee, set the technology direction with the founders, and recruited and led the initial Ruby on Rails engineering team.
- Architected and built a bespoke CRM and customer-portal system underpinning the firm's client communications.
- Set the company's software development practices from the start, including coding standards, unit testing, continuous integration and Kanban.
2008 - 2010
Co-Founder
Unicorn Studios Ipswich
- Co-founded a not-for-profit creative co-working space for remote workers, freelancers and contractors.
2019 - Present
Independent Software Engineer
Humble Technologies
- PHP and Ruby consultancy for UK clients.
2005 - 2008
Senior Software Engineer
i2, Inc. (now part of IBM)
- Responsible for the web SDK of the company's flagship analytics tool; built on Java and JavaScript, it let third parties embed its charting technology in any web page.
2002 - 2005
Software Developer
Crystal Decisions (now part of SAP)
- Built enterprise OLAP components and a front-end JavaScript SDK, and mentored new developers.
1999 - 2001