Overview

Transformational leader and MBA student empowering product-engineering departments to deliver scalable and customer-focused solutions, achieving company goals with security at the forefront.

Recent Accomplishments

• Drove an in-depth security audit at Holland & Barret’s H&B&Me, followed by mitigation or reduction of all 32 findings within 3 months.
• Scaled Holland & Barret’s H&B&Me Technology area from ~20 engineers to 57 engineers (Flutter, Go, ReactJS, QA, DevOps, Data, architects), incl. 7 Technical Leads, within 9 months.
• Rolled out end-to-end test automation (Maestro) for Holland & Barret’s H&B&Me app, from scratch, covering 100% of the automatable test-cases, catching 6 major bugs in the 1st 6 weeks.
• Successfully delivered 2 large technical migrations at So Energy; a customer care portal (Vue) to increase first contact resolution and a legacy Ruby monolith rebuild (to Kotlin microservices on Google Cloud) to increase stability and speed of maintenance and delivering new features.
• Initially pivoted So Energy squads for the migrations then reshaped to business-aligned squads, focusing on rapid innovation to validate business-metric hypotheses then iterate at pace.
• Successfully navigated Ometria (React, Python, Golang, AWS) through Black Friday weekends, ensuring the multi-tenant platform stayed stable and secure through millions of orders.
• Implemented DORA delivery metrics at Ometria for tribes to understand and improve their performance and bottlenecks, resulting in a 4x increase in deployment frequency.
• Led Flyt’s (PHP) technical delivery of 1k+ restaurant locations on a multi-tenant platform assisting acquisition by FTSE 100’s Just Eat.
• Hands-on design and implementation of Flyt’s alerting tooling (Node, NoSQL) to give real-time actionable insight to significantly reduce operational errors. Used by delivery providers, merchants and operations staff at Flyt; currently handling 3.2m orders per week for 16k restaurant locations.
• Built top-line revenues and achieved goals for Loyale clients; an early client grew revenues by 78% over 2 years, another client doubled marketing-qualified leads after 1 week of consultancy.
• Reported to MoPowered’s CEO while directing multiple teams (C#, SQL) to build and deploy 94 mobile commerce sites on the SaaS platform in 18 months assisting MoPowered’s IPO.
• Led Nuance teams in Twickenham, Bengaluru and Seattle to deliver a solution for Vodafone UK that deflected up to 40% of calls to customer care resulting in direct savings to Vodafone.

Core Competencies

• Leading, mentoring and inspiring teams
• Structuring ProdEng departments to achieve goals
• Directing co-located and offshore teams
• Implementing Kanban/SCRUM variations of Agile
• Certified ScrumMaster (CSM)
• Business and team process streamlining

Recent Professional Experience

Holland & Barrett, London (hybrid) NOV 2024 - PRESENT

H&B&Me, a scaleup inside Holland & Barrett, adds quality years to life via a behaviour change app.

H&B&Me Head of Technology

• Set technical standards for excellence, security, stability and efficiency.
• Radically improved the security posture for customer data by introducing a significantly tighter on-boarding process for access to our tools.
• Prepared to scale the app for millions of customers by identifying potential bottlenecks, planning the technical changes and scaling the DevOps team with near-shore consultants.

Freelance Consulting, London (hybrid) MAR 2024 - OCT 2024

Freelance consultancy services for technical product-focused SMEs to holistically achieve goals.

• Completed GTM strategy and initial launch of mobile solution for human-elephant coexistence with On the Edge Conservation (London) and Nature Conservation Foundation (India).
• Consultancy on product strategy and team structure (pro-bono for 2 early stage startups).

So Energy, London (hybrid) NOV 2022 - FEB 2024

A fast-growing supplier of gas and 100% renewable electricity with a customer-centric approach.

Head of Software Engineering

• Reported to the SLT, led the department with 9 squads (tech: Vue, Kotlin, Ruby, k8s, DevOps).
• Pivoted ProdEng to skillset squads in 2023H1 to successfully deliver large migrations of the customer care portal (Vue) and a legacy Ruby monolith to Kotlin microservices (Google Cloud).
• Reshaped ProdEng to business-aligned squads in H2 to rapidly improve business metrics.
• Created the Engineering career ladder, collaborating with Engineering Managers, to give a more structured approach to personal/professional development, leading to 3 senior promotions.
• Improved observability, alerting, incident run-books, incident post-mortems and follow-through on post-incident actions, resulting in 64% less incidents per quarter.
• Owned hiring for engineering with a strong filter for excellence, using values-check throughout.

  Kamal Patel (direct report, Engineering Manager)

"AJ empowered all Engineering Managers to be autonomous while always being available to guide and help mitigate risks before they eventuated. His leadership style allowed me to continuously learn in technical, leadership and domain expertise. AJ is very likeable and was respected across the department and beyond."

Flipdish, Ireland (remote-first, London) JUN 2022 - OCT 2022

Helping food businesses thrive in today’s world of online ordering, the web and the smartphone.

Director of Software Engineering, Integrations

• Reported to the CEO, led a vertical with 5 squads (tech: React, .NET, SQL, Azure, DevOps).
• Led workshops to break up the highly-coupled monolith to increase test automation/coverage.
• Owned hiring for new and existing squads with a strong filter for excellence, using psychometric test data (GIA and HPTI) and values-check throughout.

  Conor McCarthy (line manager, CEO)

"Al has high emotional intelligence and combines this with a data-led approach to building trust inside and outside of Flipdish Engineering. He skilfully manages upwards and downwards to keep business units aligned and is a driving force to improve people, processes and technology. In his short tenure with Flipdish Al built strong and empathetic relationships with his direct reports, led initiatives to build our technical and quality strategies while improving ownership of our technical areas, setting the teams up to deliver increased customer value. I would strongly recommend Al for any future roles."

  Craig Wayman (peer, Director)

"AJ is the one of the best Engineering Leadership peer I have worked with. He leads by example and his result-oriented approach ensures engineering process and priorities are aligned with business objectives. AJ is enthusiastic, driven and focused while ensuring people under his care are happy and healthy as well as high performing."

  Jane Reilly (direct report, Engineering Manager)

"At Flipdish, I managed one of the teams under Alastair's vertical. During this time, I benefited from his excellent coaching and approach to mentorship. While Alastair was spearheading a root and branch process and organisational change program he demonstrated effective communication, pragmatism and ability to achieve consensus across all levels of engineering and senior management. Alastair has a keen eye for detail and promotes technical excellence within his teams; I witnessed this in his approach towards hiring, his handover of the team to me as well as the management of my own on-boarding experience. Alastair is a skilled change-maker and would be an asset to any future company."

Freelance Consulting, London (hybrid) SEP 2021 - JUN 2022

Freelance consultancy services for technical product-focused SMEs to holistically achieve goals.

• Advised on company goals, technical and marketing strategy, team composition, agile variations, technical security, analytics, high-level product roadmap and customer discovery.
• Initial consultation to On the Edge Conservation (London) and Nature Conservation Foundation (India) to solve a human-elephant coexistence problem (completed in 2024).

  Martijn Verburg (client, CEO of jClarity, acquired by Microsoft)

"Al was instrumental in optimizing our website and customer flow, doubling the number of trialists and bringing a 4x improvement in our conversion rate for our SaaS product line. He bought a disciplined, data-driven approach to our marketing analytics, customer pipeline and was also able to give insightful product management advice which increased the stickability of our Application Performance Management tooling. I'd highly recommend Al for that instant positive impact on your customer onboarding as well as product management!"

Ometria, London (remote-first) NOV 2019 - MAY 2021

Ometria uses their SaaS marketing platform with AI-powered customer insight and cross-channel marketing to “create marketing experiences that customers will love” for large online retailers.

Director of Software Engineering, Growth

• Reported to the VP of Engineering, executing the Engineering growth strategy with 3 tribes (tech: React, Python, Node.js, Golang, SQL, NoSQL, AWS, k8s, Snowflake, DevOps)
• Owned the incident management initiative, continually improving how Ometria responded, communicated, wrote post-mortems and conducted incident retrospectives.
• Implemented a coach/champion model for data analytics and QA to give a consistent and data-driven approach across all squads to continually improve technical delivery.

  Samuel Balogh (direct report, Senior Engineer)

"AJ is a fantastic engineering director and line manager whom I met during my time at Ometria. I frequently think back to his methods and approaches for inspiration. He is great at organising teams and helping them deliver faster, and at building a culture of growth mindset and providing a framework of professional development too. Perhaps most importantly, he is a role model when it comes to efficient and empathetic communication - on a one-to-one basis, and at a team and organisational level as well."

Flyt / Just Eat, London (hybrid) APR 2018 - OCT 2019

Flyt is a platform to help the world’s top food delivery companies to work with the largest restaurant partners seamlessly through POS integrations on a global scale.

Head of Activation

• Reported to the CEO, building and executing on the activation strategy to assist acquisition by Just Eat in 2019 (tech: Typescript, PHP, Node.js, Golang, SQL, NoSQL)
• Close working relationships with commercial, operations, technical and product teams at Just Eat, Uber Eats, Nando’s, GBK, Mitchell & Butlers and more.
• Technical leadership by example for on-shore and near-shore senior engineers, Customer Success and L2/L3 support functions. Frequently diving deep on challenging technical issues.
• Recruited, on-boarded and mentored senior engineers and technical project managers.
• Led cross-functional squads to deliver on SMART goals, rolling out 1000+ new locations, sunsetting legacy services and servicing retained merchants.

  Carey Benn (line-manager, CEO of Flyt, acquired by Just Eat)

"Alastair joined us at a formative time in our start up journey, bringing maturity, experience and enthusiasm to the big and small problems that we needed to solve in order to scale. Leading efforts to deploy major brands on our integration platform and solving recurring process, people and technical problems with a smile and no small amount of personal effort and initiative. A respected member of the leadership team, and a great help in pushing Flyt forward in achieving a successful exit."

Loyale, London (hybrid) JAN 2015 - APR 2018

Loyale was two-fold; a micro-startup offering digital loyalty solutions and a freelance consultancy for technical product-focused SMEs to holistically achieve goals.

Founder, Head of Product and Engineering, Growth Consultant

• Owned the product roadmap to help SMEs with customer acquisition/retention. One client increased their top-line revenue by 78% over 2 years which they attributed to Loyale technology.
• Designed and built a loyalty app MVP in 2 weeks to test the market (Firebase, Cordova), then a white-label marketing platform to segment content to customers via multiple channels.

MoBank / MoPowered, London (in-office) FEB 2012 - DEC 2014

MoPowered built a multi-tenant mobile e-commerce SaaS/cloud platform with PCI-compliant secure mobile payment for online SME and enterprise retailers like Next, SuperDry and Waterstones.

Director of Technical Operations

• Reported to the CEO, directing on-shore and near-shore teams to deliver almost 100 SME sites in the leadup to Mopowered’s IPO (tech: .NET, Azure)
• Rolled out tooling and process to reduce demo effort eightfold and overall project delivery time.

  Ashleigh Tennent (client, Operations Director of Style Passport)

"Alastair was the Technical Operations Director at MoBank who oversaw delivery of a mobile-optimised site for style-passport. He was the driving force to ensure we delivered on time, prioritising features and coming up with solutions quickly when necessary. He was always communicative, friendly and a pleasure to work with. I would gladly work with him again."

SNAPin / Nuance Mobile Care, London (hybrid) JUN 2008 - FEB 2012

SNAPin Software, acquired by Nuance, delivered innovative mobile care solutions to enterprises, embedded on mobile devices at the point of manufacture and launched via patented call intercept.

Technical Lead, Professional Services

• Built and mentored cross-functional technical teams through challenging deployments.
• Guided co-located and offshore teams in London, Bengaluru and Seattle. Made strategic technical and business decisions for concurrent deployments.
• Delivered solutions across mobile platforms for enterprise clients; Vodafone UK (20 million subscribers), MetroPCS (8m), Vodafone ES (17m) and IB Systems/SoftBank in Japan (23m).

  James Stennett (line-manager, Senior Manager of Professional Services)

"I worked with Alastair at SNAPin, which was acquired by Nuance Communications. Alastair worked in professional services, and was often times 'the voice of the customer' within Nuance Communications. Alastair was a key contributor on several high profile customer facing projects for Professional Services. Alastair often completed spike investigations, created proof of concepts, gave demonstrations, implemented javascript client applications (with a connected server) for various customers, and often ported those applications to different devices with different operating systems within customer timelines and expectations. More importantly, Alastair was capable of working around critical core product bugs by proposing creative solutions that he hand rolled, helping to keep customer relationships happy and healthy."

Mobile Technology Finalist at the BCS IT Industry Awards 2008

• Worked closely with Vodafone UK (VFUK) to deliver an end-to-end solution; a mobile app connected to Nuance servers that transformed data from VFUK’s operational back-end.
• Guided technical teams through specification, implementation, porting, testing and delivery of mobile and backend components, initially ported to 12 devices on 2 mobile platforms.
• The solution deflected up to 40% of calls to customer care resulting in direct savings to VFUK.

PCS Instruments, London (in-office) FEB 2004 - NOV 2007

PCS is a world leader in design and manufacture of lubricity test equipment used in 40+ countries.

Lead Developer and Architect

• Architected and implemented .NET (2.0/3.0), embedded C and hardware solutions, from concept to production, to complement mechanical components. Now used in high-quality test laboratories worldwide.
• Managed projects and guided staff to achieve key objectives.
• Implemented source control systems, defect and feature tracking systems, automated testing systems and outsourced electronic production.
• Developed complex modular system to enable PCS to rapidly prototype new products and related software.
• Designed control systems and ultra-high accuracy analogue interfaces with embedded C and a lightweight communication protocol to interface to a .NET user interface.
• The system reduced PCS’ design costs and provided a much faster time-to-market than previous bespoke design models.

Neanda, London (in-office) SEP 2003 - DEC 2003

Neanda was a small start-up with a vision to design, produce and distribute modular audio-control equipment in the emerging consumer audio production market.

Senior Software and Hardware Developer

• Architected and started on the implementation of products using a mix of hardware design, embedded C and .NET (1.1).
• Oversaw budgets, timelines and tendering of mechanical design.
• Developed bespoke software communications protocol, and built proof-of-concept prototypes for all modules.
• Guided local and offshore technical resources developing USB/MIDI drivers.

Vista Marketing, New Zealand (hybrid) APR 2002 - JUN 2003

Vista Marketing specialised in strategic placement of indoor framed advertising in high-profile public locations in New Zealand.

Co-founder and Director

• Saw the concept in the London underground with no equivalent channel in NZ.
• Developed Vista from concept phase to a company that dealt with multiple agencies and clients throughout New Zealand.
• Successfully pitched the concept to sports stadiums, swim/gym centres, shopping malls and carpark buildings to secure exclusive site contracts.
• Developed presentation materials and negotiated with sites, advertising agencies and clients as well as managing the internal sales team.

Commtest Instruments / General Electric, NZ and London (remote) FEB 2000 - SEP 2003

Commtest is the world’s leading designer of machine vibration analysis equipment, acquired by General Electric Measurement & Control

Software and Hardware Contractor

• Designed and programmed early-IoT vibration analysis devices for remote monitoring of factory machinery.
• Authored embedded C and 8051 assembly software for vibration analysis data-loggers.
• Made key decisions on software research, design, hardware concepts, development lead-times, prototyping and production processes that made Commtest’s production and distribution significantly more efficient and cost effective.
• Led research for automatic asset tagging systems and Intrinsically Safe Ex solutions.
• Maintained effective communication between London and New Zealand.

Courses and Qualifications

• Current MBA Student, Senior Leader Apprenticeship, Keele University, Stoke-on-Trent
• Behaviours of Inclusion, People Development, Leading Change and Strategic Thinking - Lifelabs, London
• AgilePM - APMG International, London
• Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) - Scrum Alliance, London
• Payment Card Industry and Data Security Standards - 2-sec, London
• BE Engineering, Honours: Software, Management and Electronics - University of Canterbury, New Zealand
• BSc Science, Honours: Quantum Physics and Astronomy - University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Volunteering

• COVID-19 Community Support and Vaccination Steward, NHS Volunteer Responder 2020-23, London
• Mentor, co-ordinator and judge, The Conservation Project and Bright Tide Hackathons 2020-23, London
• Operations Specialist and Direct Assistance Specialist, Crisis at Christmas 2017, 2018, 2019 & 2022, London

...and finally

I was born, raised and educated in New Zealand and have spent the last 20+ years living in London.

I have been lucky enough to travel the world by snowboard, tuk-tuk and scooter. When I am not travelling my life revolves around family, friends, food and casual kayaking on the Thames.

In my spare time I support local businesses with pro-bono technical and marketing advice.