Nine years at Freelancer.com, starting as a full-stack product engineer on the Client Success team, then leading engineering teams across three offices, and ending up running platform engineering: the infrastructure, standards, and tooling that 70 engineers build on top of.
I still ship code daily, still investigate incidents when they happen, and review around 430 diffs and schemas a year. I've also hired and developed several of the engineers who now lead other platform teams. The writing on this site is what that work actually looks like. Nine years in one place compounds in ways that are hard to get elsewhere. I know what good platform work looks like from the inside, and I've learnt how to make it last.
Outside work I build things I actually use: a homelab, personal finance software, and a photography business tool my partner uses every day for client work. I ride bikes. I have a habit of investigating things until I understand them properly.
Experience
Engineering Manager
Hands-on engineering leader for the UK team. I own PHP platform health, developer experience, and engineering standards across a 70-engineer distributed org. I ship production code daily alongside managing a small direct team, running code and schema reviews, and coordinating with DevOps, SysEng, and API Core teams.
What I work on
- Platform engineering: PHP 8.1+ production rollout, custom-compiled PHP binaries, functional test infrastructure (35% suite time reduction)
- Static analysis: 70 custom rules (Psalm, PHPStan, Rector, PHPCS) encoding platform standards in CI
- Developer tooling: Built the Developer Workbench, a 40k-line Electron/Angular desktop app the team uses daily
- Code review: ~430 reviews/year across the org, go-to reviewer for database schema changes
- People: Line management for up to 10 engineers; hired a graduate who now leads the platform performance team
Engineering Team Lead
Led three engineering teams successively across London, Buenos Aires (remote), and Vancouver (remote), balancing hands-on full-stack engineering with people management, hiring, and on-call incident response.
- Co-founded and staffed the Buenos Aires engineering office, the company’s first engineering presence in Latin America
- Ran London office operations for 15–20 engineering staff: hiring pipelines, engineering culture, facilities
- Established team norms around code quality, testing, and documentation. These later fed into the platform-wide PHP standards programme
Software Engineer
Graduate hire. Worked across the full stack for the Client Success team, designed and ran A/B tests, performed data analysis, and contributed to establishing the Buenos Aires engineering team. Began designing what would become the company’s core customer support infrastructure within weeks of joining: the same system that remains in production nine years later.
Education
BSc Computer Science
Swansea University · 2012–2015 · First Class
MSc Information Security
University of Surrey · 2015–2016 · First Class
Work
Developer Workbench
→An Electron desktop app built to close the developer experience gaps a 70-engineer team was working around every day: devbox management, merge queue, AWS, RabbitMQ, and more.
Support Platform
→Full-stack customer support infrastructure, designed as a graduate and still in production nine years later. Now powers AI agent workflows and is replacing the company's commercial helpdesk.
PHP Type Safety
→70 custom static analysis rules enforcing platform standards automatically at build time across a million-line codebase.