University of Sussex — MSc AI: Knowledge-based Systems

Graduate Research Centre for Cognitive Science

Full scholarship from the Engineering And Physical Science Research Council.
Hand-coded ANN/BP, SOM in C; DATR in XML/XSLT; semantic XML; etc

University of Sussex — BA (Hons) 2:1 English Literature

With a special interest in Samuel Beckett,Elizabethan drama.

OVERVIEW

Technical leader and platform architect with over 20 years’ experience guiding the design, rebuild and scaling of production systems across media, finance, healthcare and government.

Specialised in leading digital transformation initiatives — moving organisations from legacy platforms to modern, cloud-based architectures built on Node.js, AWS and containerised infrastructure. Experienced in defining technical strategy, selecting tooling and architecture, and establishing disciplined engineering practices including CI/CD, automated testing, audit trails, monorepos and Agile delivery.

Comfortable operating at the boundary of business and technology: working with founders, executives and domain experts to translate product vision and regulatory requirements into clear technical roadmaps, while ensuring delivery remains pragmatic and commercially grounded.

Strong track record of full lifecycle ownership — from early-stage architectural decisions through implementation, deployment, scaling and team development. Have led and contributed to technical hiring across startups and enterprise environments, assessing capability, architectural judgement and long-term team fit.

Recent focus on AI-enabled platforms, including practical implementation of LLM integration, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector search and semantic modelling to enhance product capability and user experience.

After many years delivering transformation projects across diverse sectors, now seeking long-term ownership of a platform and the opportunity to lead a sustained digital evolution, ideally within reach of Oxford or Taunton.

Selected examples of platform architecture, transformation and regulatory-scale delivery

Virtual Health Network / ABPI Pharmaceutical Portal
Led development of the world’s first online pharmaceutical registration platform, enabling earlier release of medicines through digital submission and transformation of regulatory workflows.

Reliance Mutual Insurance (Tunbridge Wells)
Designed and delivered the full-stack data governance system required for compliance with EU Solvency II regulations. Consulted with Chief Risk Officers, actuaries, and end users to ensure correctness and usability. Owned architecture, implementation, documentation, testing, and rollout, providing a secure, auditable platform for regulatory compliance.

Companies House (UK Government)
Architected and implemented the ElasticSearch-based indexing and search platform still in production, transforming discoverability across the UK’s national company register. Delivered full lifecycle design, backend implementation, and frontend integration.

European Aviation Safety Agency (EU Commission)
Delivered a secure, auditable legislative consultation and document management system used by industry stakeholders across Europe. Integrated version control, authentication, and complex regulatory workflows.

BBC Forge
Proposed and established the architectural foundations of the BBC’s internal development and hosting platform, creating a unified, containerised development environment across teams.

BBC Earth
Architected and implemented the Java/MySQL service layer for an award-winning global digital platform. Designed programme taxonomy, RDF/OWL API, and geospatial data systems to model and visualise worldwide taxonomic distribution. Acted as Agile mentor and inter-team liaison. This was the first production project on BBC Forge and one of only two IT projects highlighted by the Director General as a major success.

Thomson Reuters (Portfolio Management Platform)
Introduced a comprehensive automated test strategy (unit and e2e), significantly improving reliability and release confidence for a large-scale Electron-based financial application.

Deutsche Bank
Audited and strengthened architectural and procedural practices within one of the bank’s largest React applications, improving engineering standards, testing discipline, and overall maintainability.

SELECTED PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCES

Pre-Doctoral Research

December 2026 - on-going

Creating a pipeline for semantic analysis of large-scale early modern English using BERT-style LLM, FAISS for RAG, Postgres, Python, SolidJS UI.

Zaizi / The National Archives Remote — Freelance Developer

February 2026

Working for an agency for a government client, and the shortest ever contract yet with glowing references: sudden budgetary contraction did not prevent me creating a rich WebSocket-powered SolidJS editor for EAD XML, a Python Flask to validate XML fragments, and low-level instructions in how to replace an ActiveX COM API with WebSockets. Including some unit and full e2e tests.

ZM Legal Remote — Platform Owner

January 2025 - December 2025

Legal CMS for Hungarian lawyers, SolidJS, BeerCSS, NodeJS, Postgres, RAG with FAISS and tiny LLM in Python.

Project Hessdalen Remote — Freelance Developer

May 2025 - June 2025

Rewrote the below service for NextJS and deployment to Vercel.

Izel Plants Remote — Freelance Developer

September 2024 - February 2025

For a recurring client, designed and developed a vanilla Electron-based CMS to create, edit and export maps of plant species distribution in the US, including automated image-to-GeoJSON conversion, and county-selection WebComponent.

Project Hessdalen Remote — Platform Owner

March 2024 - August 2024

Created an OpenLayers, PostGIS, React/Redux-Toolkit mapping application Typescript monorepo to document UAP reports,and sensor data, testing with Playwright. Ported an unconventional undocumented, Norwegian MS Access database..

Datatecnics, Remote for Manchester— Platform Owner

July 2022 - January 2024

Owned full technical lifecycle for a Dockerised EC2-hosted platform visualising mains water pipe network vulnerabilities: architecture, implementation, CI/CD pipeline, AWS infrastructure, monitoring, documentation, onboarding.

Introduced Agile practices and Jira across the team.

Designed and implemented complex geospatial data processing: proximity searches, boundary-based aggregations, mock map data, and output generation in multiple formats (GeoJSON, custom Mapbox tiles) across varied projections and datasets.

Developed Typescript monorepo using Vue3 Composition API, NestJS, and PostGIS; delivered full unit and end-to-end test coverage with Playwright.

Integrated bespoke AI system for anomaly detection and predictive insights.

Participated in technical hiring: CV review, interviews, architectural assessments, and hiring recommendations.

New Thinking Allowed, Remote for USA — Platform Owner

March 2020 - September 2023

Built a self-updating video portal for ingesting, indexing, and searching video content related to consciousness studies and paranormal research. Implemented full-text search of captions and custom search indexing.

Designed and developed a custom WordPress theme in collaboration with a graphic designer, including bespoke data ingestion workflows via APIs and direct database manipulation for automation and performance. Built admin UI for content creation and management.

Ported a Polymer 3.0 Shop app to support PayPal integration, multi-language and multi-currency internationalization; built front-end search using WebComponents via Stencil in Typescript; integrated data from YouTube and Open Library APIs.

Managed technical volunteers: assessment, onboarding, and mentoring.

Hansen/Frontier, Remote for UK/USA — Sr Developer

June 2021 - December 2021

Senior dev in a team developing a young Typescript service layer for the largest phone retailer in the US. Express, Nest, OpenSearch, Mongo, Puppeteer

Re-wrote the main framework for speed, clarity, consistency and logging after a necessarily rushed initial iteration. Involved in CV reviews and technical interviews and hiring recommendations.

Rewind FX, St Albans & Remote— Sr Developer, Team Lead

October 2019 - March 2020

Leading a small team to create for the Dubai Expo a performant interactive Leaflet map in event-based Vanilla JSm hosted in iOS and Android webviews, and served by nginx for on-site kiosks.

Collaborated across international teams, anticipating API requirements and identifying potential design issues early.

The interesting part was replacing Google Directions API through developing in JS an A*-based route-finding and navigation system, which I did in a couple of weeks as the multi-million-dollar funded partner couldn't provide one in time for demos. Involved in technical hiring: CV review and hiring recommendations.

Zoopla/101-Ways, London — Sr Developer

June 2019 - September 2019

Adding features and rationalizing the Perl engine, improving performance and accessibility to templates and JS routines. Added tests with Lighthouse, e2e with Cucumber.

Izel Plants, Remote for US— Freelance Developer

January 2019 - March 2019

Updating the plant distribution maps to PostGIS, wrote a stock-control app in Electron and Vanilla JS.

IceMobile, Amasterdam— Sr Developer

November 2018 - March 2019

Adding CRUD user-management to a Polymer 3.0 loyalty-points application. Rationalized a number of repositories into one whilst adding updates to create an application suitable for white-labeling. Removed WCT. Added Mocha, Chia, Webpack.

Nike, Holland/Portland OR — Sr Temporary Worker

February 2018 - July 2019

Prototyping the new homepages: es6 React with webpack, Babel, dynamic imports, server-side rendering, SASS. Patches aiding development of their Redux Saga-driven React spreadsheet code, adding 95% of the 100% test coverage. Involved in technical hiring: CV review, technical interviews, architectural assessment and hiring recommendations.

Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt Am Main — Sr Developer

April 2017 - Sept 2017

Developing components and screens for parts of what they call 'the world's largest React app'.

Detecting and reporting major architectural and procedural issues, highlighting technical specifications.Implementing and enforcing corporate React best-practices.Advocating for, and implementing, stronger e2e and unit testing.

Thomson-Reuters, London — Sr Developer

January 2016 - June 2016

Developing new features for the flagship portfolio management Electron-hosted Angular/Closure app. Wrote both the e2e and unit test suites in Cucumber / Protractor, Karma / Jasmine. Aided in porting legacy components to new Polymer versions. Wrote Gulp deployment scripts.

Blismedia, Belgravia — Sr Developer

March 2015 - July 2015

Internationalization of the main business app, in Perl, MySQL and React.

Companies House, Cardiff — Sr Developer

May 2014 - November 2014

Delivered full lifecycle development of the ElasticSearch-based indexing and search architecture powering the public company register, including backend implementation and vanilla JS frontend integration.

Added features and resolved bugs in the existing Perl/SQL system to maintain reliability and performance.

Onboarded and mentored a junior developer, ensuring knowledge transfer and sustainable maintenance.

Reliance Mutual Insurance, Tunbridge Wells — Lead Engineer / Platform Architect

July 2012 - February 2013

Designed and delivered the full-stack data governance system required for compliance with the EU Solvency II regulation, consulting with CROs, actuaries, and stakeholders to ensure regulatory alignment.

Owned architecture, implementation, testing, documentation, and rollout, providing a secure, reliable platform for regulatory compliance.

Ensured maintainability and knowledge transfer through mentoring and technical documentation.

BBC Buyers’ Guide, Remote for UK — Sr Developer

May 2011 - December 2011

Apache mod_perl, Pinwheel, DBIx:Class, various third-party APIs, TT for the Commercial User Journeys project that facilitates BBC pages linking to commercial outlets.

BBC Earth, London & Remote — Platform Architect/Lead Developer

December 2008 - February 2010

Architected and implemented the Java/MySQL service layer for an award-winning global digital platform, transforming programme and natural science data for use across multiple applications.

Designed and developed the database schema and data models; extended Spring 2.5 for improved REST support; delivered a full JUnit test suite integrated with Hudson.

Acted as Agile mentor and liaison between development teams, ensuring cross-team consistency and knowledge transfer.

The project was recognised by the Director General as one of only two IT projects highlighted as a success, forming the first production deployment on the BBC Forge internal platform.

Future LAB AG, Zurich & Remote — Sr Developer

February 2008 - May 2008

A Google map app to reflect data gathered by a public-facing German-language RDMS, with a variety of prototypes culminating in post-processing of Google MyMap Javascript, KML, and HTML to produce a variety of switchable map overlays, interacting with a partially-documented bespoke server-side system.

GSK, Essex — Sr Developer

February 2008 - March 2008

Automated functional e2e and unit testing of, and help in porting, the bespoke in-house drug discovery platform.

Advertising.com, London — Team Lead & Systems Developer

March 2007 - August 2008

Ran the small team of UK developers. Wrote this Time/Warner company’s first two e2e workflow management systems in Perl, mod_perl, and vanilla JS.Managed technical hiring: CV review, technical interviews, architectural assessment and hiring recommendations.

BBC Radio & Music Interactive R&D, London — Sr Developer

April 2006 - January 2007

Wrote the complete Audio Annotation app. Wrote the SMS visualization app for the Radio 1 homepage and BBC Electronic Proms. App in Perl, C and XS to visualize wav files.Documented the state of the external dev env and wrote the specifications for the initial commissioning of what is now the BBC Forge dev env.

EU Aviation Safety Agency, Cologne— Platform Architect & Lead Developer

June 2005 - February 2006

Designed and delivered a secure, auditable internal document storage system with Subversion/WebDAV, integrated SSO via LDAP and Active Directory, meeting strict regulatory and operational requirements.

Architected and implemented a web application (Perl/vanilla JS) enabling industry stakeholders and the public to review and comment on proposed legislation, supporting compliance and transparency.

Owned full lifecycle from requirements gathering and system architecture through development, testing, and deployment, ensuring robust security and regulatory alignment.

BBC Digital Curriculum/”Jam”, London — Lead Developer

November 2004 - May 2005

I replaced a team of Siemens staff and created in three months the SCORM ingestion app they failed to create in two years.

ProCheckUp Ltd, London — Platform Architect & Lead Developer

October 2003 - November 2004

Designed and developed a GUI and hosted version of the company’s bespoke penetration testing software. Mod_perl, Perl, vanilla JS, various Linux distros. Hired and managed software testers.

Polygon Kft, Budapest — Java Consultant

February 2002 - May 2002

Analysis and documentation of a bespoke Java system to provide a GUI to AS/400s, including documentation of critical threading issues.

Virtual Health Network/ABPI, Epsom/Remote — Platform Architect & Lead Engineer

August 2000 - August 2001

Designed and delivered the world’s first online pharmaceutical compendium, enabling companies to release medicines and doctors to prescribe up to 364 days earlier than print-based processes allowed.

Owned full lifecycle architecture, backend (Perl/mod_perl) and frontend (vanilla JS) development, and integration with regulatory workflows.

Developed robust, secure systems supporting high compliance standards, with operational reliability across multiple stakeholders.

Pioneered digital transformation of pharmaceutical registrations, setting the standard for subsequent regulatory platforms.

SKILLS

Currently enjoying Solid with bun, Vite and PostGIS and Playwright

FE/BE Vanilla JavaScript, TypeScript, ECMA

Vue3 Composition API, Pinia; React (Hooks, Query,), Polymer Web Components, Svelte

Node, Nest, Koa, Express Ajv, Joi, etc

Various state-management libs

MySQL, Postgres, PostGIS, SQLite (C extensions, client-side)

TDD BDD Agile, I18n & l10n

Unit testing (vitest, Jest), e2e testing (Playwright)

Jenkins, Docker, AWS/EC2

SSO, OAuth2.0 etc

Vite, CSS3, Geo APIs, MIDI APIs

Formerly: Angular, Perl, Python, Java, C, Rust, XSLT, Prolog, Oracle, Angular, Svelte, ElasticSearch. Webpack. gup

OUTSIDE WORK

All sorts of guitar, from flamenco to Iron Maiden.

Also: bass, oud, sitar, tar, laud, mandola, mandolin, some keyboards, etc

FILM SOUNDTRACK

Two small indie films to my name so far. Currently studying orchestral arrangement and composition.

FAMILY

Married for 20+ years, two children, one at Oxford, the other at secondary school.

LANGUAGES

Native English,
A2 Swedish
A2 German
A1 Hungarian
A1 Norwegian

INTERNATIONAL LIFE

Born in London, lived in the South-west and Sussex, Cologne, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and Budapest; also worked in Zurich,, briefly in Oregon, and remotely for clients in Singapore and Russia. It’s good to travel.

CURRENTLY EXPLORING

MacBERTh LLM, SolidJS, Beer CSS, contemporary Iceland classical music, baritone guitar, 8dio Majestica, and still playing with the Web MIDI API

Personal Projects 2024-2025

Using AI to improve productivity five fold by managing it as if it were a human team: small, logically- and semantically-intact code blocks and a clear project plan.

React app and dot net app to allow a mobile device to act as a remote control for programs running on a PC.

React/Jotai WebMIDI app to create live textures from MIDI input, a la Foundation.Python app to classify and search one-shot wav files using FFT and DBSCAN.

Svelte app to create subtitles/Cubase timelines

Soundtrack for independent films The Courier and The Tunnel At The End of the Light.