Career

I am a product-focused lead software engineer with over 15 years of experience delivering products from concept to scale for startups, SMEs, and global leaders. Based in Sydney, I have dual Australian/UK citizenship and have led teams in Melbourne, London, and Barcelona. My work combines technical excellence, user empathy, and applied AI.

Key Career Highlights

• Led the build of a Webby-nominated AI companion for arthritis sufferers, Clara, achieving 87% approval from specialists and 90% recommending it to patients.
• Delivered an agentic AI search adopted by the Australian federal government, healthcare providers, and national infrastructure, on track to answer nearly 2 million questions per year.
• Founded Sound Shelter, a vinyl marketplace scaled to 100k users and 30+ partner stores.
• Part-time CTO of Rebuilt, Australia’s first self-service platform for generating verified Product Carbon Footprints (PCFs).
• Engineered and integrated platforms for Apple, Vodafone, Expedia, Puma, and CSIRO.
• Founding engineer at Precept, awarded Google DNI funding to combat online misinformation using NLP.

Experience

Lead Product Engineer — Pollen

Jan 2022 – Present · Sydney, Australia

Pollen is an award-winning digital design, UX, and product studio. I lead the engineering team, shaping technical direction and AI strategy. Promoted from Senior Engineer to Lead in March 2023.

Selected Achievements

• Clara – AI Companion for Arthritis (Webby-nominated): Architected and led the build of an iOS/Android/Web app supporting 3.7M Australians with arthritis. Designed a secure RAG pipeline to surface contextual answers, achieving 87% approval from subject matter experts and 90% specialist recommendation. Featured on 9News, Sydney Morning Herald, and The Age.
• Agentic AI Search: Architected and launched a production AI search product, now adopted by the Australian federal government, healthcare providers, and national infrastructure organisations. Handles millions of queries annually with a pipeline including PII redaction, LLM-as-judge classification, dynamic query rewrite, hybrid semantic/vector search, and LLM summarisation.
• Rebuilt (Part-time CTO): Leading technical direction for Australia’s first self-service platform enabling manufacturers to generate and publish verified PCFs. Designed and launched the platform to make trusted carbon data accessible at scale.

Additional Contributions

• Leadership team member driving technical & AI strategy.
• Mentored 2 full-time engineers + contractors.
• Designed infrastructure across AWS, GCP, Vercel, Expo using IaC (Pulumi).
• Built proofs-of-concept for discovery and won multi-million-dollar client projects with technical expertise.

Stack: TypeScript, Python, React/Next.js, Node.js, Django, Prisma, Postgres, TailwindCSS, React Native/Expo, AWS, GCP, Pulumi, RAG, LlamaIndex, Langfuse, OpenAI, Anthropic

Founder / Engineer — Sound Shelter

Apr 2013 – Jan 2024 · Sydney, Australia

• Built and scaled a vinyl marketplace to 100k users and 30+ partner stores.
• Designed recommendation algorithms and built infrastructure to pull catalogues via APIs, feeds, and scraping.
• Created and launched a native iOS app.

Stack: React/Next.js, Node.js, Prisma, MySQL, Tailwind, React Native, AWS

Senior Software Engineer — Endeavour

Jan 2020 – Jan 2022 · Sydney, Australia

• Migrated the events platform to React + Django, serving thousands of prospective students.
• Built a student onboarding platform used by hundreds per term.
• Developed a clinic booking front-end handling hundreds of instant payments weekly.

Stack: React, Django, Postgres, Tailwind, AWS

Senior Software Engineer — Precept

Aug 2018 – Aug 2019 · Barcelona, Spain

Precept (YouCheck) received Google DNI funding to improve online information environments.

• Built backend APIs for ML-driven misinformation detection in text and images.
• Led a team of two on a React/Node platform connecting journalists with experts.
• Managed DevOps and code review.

Stack: React, Next.js, Node.js, Python, Django, Google Cloud

Integration Engineer — Partnerize

Dec 2016 – Apr 2018 · Sydney, Australia

• APAC technical lead integrating global clients (Apple, Expedia, Vodafone, Nike, Emirates).
• Built custom integrations with third-party APIs for partner marketing infrastructure.
• Pre-sales/post-sales consultant on multi-million-dollar deals.

Stack: Python, MySQL

Sales Engineer — HomeAway.com (Expedia Inc.)

Jul 2012 – Aug 2016 · Melbourne & Sydney, Australia

• First technical hire in APAC.
• Built feed parsing infrastructure powering ~20,000 property listings for two years.
• Led technical consulting for APAC pre- and post-sales.

Stack: Python

Technical Skills

• Languages: TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, SQL
• Front-end: React, Next.js, React Native, Tailwind
• Back-end: Node.js, Hono, Express, Django, FastAPI, GraphQL, Prisma, Drizzle, Postgres
• AI: RAG, Semantic/Hybrid search, Vector databases, Prompt engineering, OpenAI, Anthropic, LlamaIndex, Langfuse, Vercel AI SDK, Agents / Workflows
• Infrastructure: AWS, Google Cloud, Vercel, Docker, CI/CD

Education

BSc (Hons) Internet Computing Northumbria University — Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Working Rights

Australian citizen (dual Australian/UK)