I’ve spent my entire career in UK banking – not because I love banking, but because regulated environments are where technology adoption is hardest, and that’s what I find interesting. Every role has followed the same thread: find the next important technology, figure out how to make it work safely inside a bank, and build a community of engineers around it.
Learning the craft (Halifax, 2000–2011)
I joined Halifax straight out of York, writing code on internet banking that served over a million customers a day. That’s where I learned that production systems don’t care about your clever abstractions – they care about reliability, performance, and whether your on-call team can diagnose a Severity 1 at 3am.
Over eleven years I went from junior developer to platform specialist to the person they called when things went wrong. I led the team that transformed our support model from reactive fire-fighting to proactive quality gating – an Operational Acceptance Checklist that cut new system errors by 72% in three months. I drove performance work that reduced page sizes by 74% and shaved customer bandwidth by 85%. And I was SME on a £200m+ platform rebuild that delivered new internet banking across three brands.
The lesson from this era: technology that can’t survive contact with production isn’t technology – it’s a prototype.
Enterprise architecture and innovation (Barclays, 2011–2023)
I moved to Barclays to work at a bigger scale – group-wide architecture, API strategy, and eventually the inaugural Distinguished Engineer programme. This is where I learned that the hardest engineering problems aren’t technical. They’re organisational.
I led Barclays’ first Group API Strategy – getting sign-off from every CTO across UK, Cards, Investment Bank, Corporate, and Functions. I architected the first external API Platform, taking it from concept through board approval. I introduced GraphQL as an approved API style group-wide. Each of these involved building consensus across people who had every reason to protect their own territory.
The deeper lesson from this work was about APIs as an innovation strategy, not just a technical pattern. Opening up data and functionality through well-governed APIs is how you unlock third-party innovation and future revenue streams – without exposing the organisation to uncontrolled risk. Clean API boundaries give you a contract: external partners, internal teams, and increasingly AI agents can all interact with your systems safely, because the interface is explicit, versioned, and governed. That thinking has only become more relevant as agentic AI creates demand for machine-to-machine access at scale.
The most formative experience was the B-Key initiative – bridging the Dallas Innovation Centre with traditional Retail Banking. It taught me that innovation inside a regulated bank isn’t about moving fast and breaking things. It’s about earning trust, managing stakeholders, and giving innovative teams just enough space to prove their ideas without triggering the immune response.
I also started building communities here – chairing the REST API Community of Practice and co-chairing the Mobile Community of Practice, where the Mobile CoP alone saved over £1m through cross-BU asset sharing. I mentored fintech startups through Barclays Rise, spoke at Mulesoft Connect (250+), presented API security posture to the US Federal Reserve, and trained 350+ engineers on API best practices.
The lesson from this era: the skill isn’t writing code – it’s getting buy-in for the right technical decision across an organisation that defaults to “no”.
Emerging tech strategy and community (LBG, 2023–present)
I came back to Lloyds Banking Group to do what I’ve always done, but with more autonomy: take emerging technology from “interesting idea” to “group-wide default.” This time it’s serverless containers.
The journey started with a strategic case – tying serverless to board-level cloud migration metrics using Gartner and Forrester research to accelerate the roadmap. Then it was governance: getting Cloud Run, Azure Container Apps, and a “serverless containers over code” strategy through the Group Enterprise Architecture Review Council. Then golden paths: Terraform modules, Harness pipelines, developer platform integration. Then production: Digital Modernisation now runs on Cloud Run Jobs at a fraction of Kubernetes cost (£0.07 vs ~£15 over 4 months), with hundreds of workloads in the pipeline.
But the part I’m most energised about is the community building. I co-founded “AI Amigos” inside Public Cloud Platform. I organised Build with AI hack events – one day in London we ran two back-to-back sessions, 65 internal colleagues and 50 GDG London members, and the external event scored 4.88/5 with a +94 NPS. I’ve done 18+ speaking and organising events in 2025 alone, from Serverless Days Milan to GDG DevFest Scotland to internal sessions reaching 650+ colleagues.
This era’s lesson is still being written, but the theme is clear: the best way to drive technology adoption isn’t mandates – it’s communities, credibility, and making the safe path the easy path.
For the full achievement list, see my CV. This site is about the story behind the decisions.