Solutions Engineer and Backend Engineer with 9+ years building production systems that scale.
Currently leading GenAI strategy at NBCUniversal while maintaining hands-on engineering excellence.
Proven track record of translating VP-level requirements into technical solutions, optimizing systems
for performance (90% latency reduction), and saving $240K annually through strategic infrastructure
improvements.
Technical Skills
Job Experience
NBCUniversal
Solutions Engineer2024 - present
Lead technical strategy for department's first production-ready GenAI system, translating
VP-level requirements into engineering deliverables and managing cross-functional
stakeholder relationships across multiple teams.
Serve as GenAI subject matter expert, architecting custom solutions on AWS and Azure
platforms while guiding organizational adoption strategy and best practices.
Direct engineering team development from concept to production, balancing 40% hands-on
engineering with 60% solution architecture and technical leadership responsibilities.
Collaborate with product teams on operational impact assessment, ensuring robust monitoring
and observability strategies are in place before feature releases.
Delivered critical GenAI incident management tool for 2024 Olympics streaming platform in 8 weeks, supporting millions of concurrent viewers during peak sporting events.
Architect solutions for Event Management Platform, overseeing third-party contractor
integrations while maintaining company standards and operational excellence.
Sky UK
Software Engineer2021 - 2024
Built and maintained high-performance Go microservices handling real-time data ingestion
from multiple third-party sources via BigQuery and PostgreSQL pipelines, serving the global
streaming organization.
Designed and implemented scalable RESTful APIs processing millions of requests, architecting
efficient data flows between microservices and external data providers.
Developed critical developer productivity tooling in Go for operations teams, streamlining
deployment workflows and reducing manual intervention across the engineering organization.
Re-engineered NodeJS API Gateway to Go, achieving 90% latency reduction (2s+ to <200ms)
through optimized concurrent processing and efficient memory management.
Implemented comprehensive APM across 50+ microservices using OpenTelemetry, enabling
end-to-end distributed tracing and performance bottleneck identification.
Led backend standardization initiatives, reducing average issue resolution from 3 weeks to 1
week while establishing coding standards and CI/CD best practices.
Optimized logging infrastructure saving $240,000 annually through strategic log level
management and retention policies across distributed systems.
Immediate Media
PHP Developer2018 - 2021
Played a pivotal role in developing a new headless content delivery platform built on
WordPress, utilising Symfony, Docker, and AWS technologies (Lambda, CodePipeline, ECS),
demonstrating proficiency in modern web architectures and cloud services.
Engineered and maintained a new ElasticSearch 7 service and associated PHP microservice,
showcasing expertise in search optimisation and microservices architecture.
Designed and implemented a related content module leveraging ElasticSearch similarity
search, significantly enhancing reader engagement and content discoverability, driving
measurable improvements in user interaction metrics.
Orchestrated the migration to Docker-based development environments, replacing Vagrant,
which streamlined local setup processes and ensured local/production parity, resulting in
substantial improvements in developer productivity and deployment consistency.
OpenCRM
PHP Developer2015 - 2018
Contributed to large-scale web application development and delivered customized client
solutions using PHP, MySQL, C#, VB 6, JavaScript, jQuery, HTML, and CSS.
Mentored an apprentice developer, demonstrating the ability to share knowledge and foster
teamwork.
Projects
Generative AI Assistant
Sky UK
Led the development of NBCUniversal's first production GenAI assistant using
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture, serving 1000+ internal users across
multiple departments. Architected a scalable solution on Azure Container Apps integrating 50+
data sources with Azure AI Search. Built custom Python components for advanced query
processing, multi-index search, and dynamic GPT-4 response generation. Managed executive-level
stakeholder relationships and directed cross-functional development teams. Reduced information
retrieval time by 75% and significantly improved decision-making processes across the organization.
Application Performance Monitoring
Sky UK
In preparation for a high-profile NFL game on Peacock, I led a performance optimisation
initiative. We implemented APM across 50+ microservices, identifying a NodeJS API gateway as
the main bottleneck. By rewriting it in Go, we reduced request latency from over 2 seconds to
200ms. I also introduced Smoke Testing with response time checks for ongoing performance
monitoring. The project utilised Go, Prometheus, Grafana, Tempo, and OpenTelemetry.
Flexrole Discord Bot
Personal Project
To improve my Go skills, I created a Discord bot that tracks user activity in voice chats and
assigns roles based on participation. This project helped me understand event-based
architecture by implementing listeners for Discord events. I also built a dashboard using PHP
(Laravel framework) and TailwindCSS, allowing users to configure the bot for their Discord
servers. The project utilised Go for the bot's core functionality, with PHP, MySQL, and
Laravel for the web interface.
Education
Baltic Training Services
Level 3 Software Development2014 - 2015
After leaving school and sampling a college course I concluded an apprenticeship would prove a
more successful career path for me. My apprenticeship with Baltic Training Services taught me
invaluable skills in software development courses including C#, Visual Basic, MS-SQL, Unix,
Software Development Process & Testing and Customer Services. During my time at Baltic, I gained
commercial experience which has since allowed me to advance my software development career.