What I've built and led
2025
AI TransformationAI & DataEngineering LeadershipCo-founder & CTO, Lexacon
AI platform for construction commercial risk
Mid-sized construction firms manage commercial risk across large volumes of unstructured project documents. The goal was to turn those documents into structured intelligence that project and commercial teams could act on.
Shaped the risk management methodology and architected single-tenant AI infrastructure with modular agents, hierarchical tagging and orchestration, handling ingestion and retrieval across 100K+ documents. Integrated AWS Bedrock and OpenRouter for LLM routing and RAG, balancing cost, latency and data residency. 5 projects across 2 clients ran live until the platform was sunset when funding didn't close.
2023 to present
AI TransformationGovernance & RiskVolunteer Advisor, Strategic Technologies Insights Group, PMI
How organisations are rolling out AI in software development
A global group of PMI volunteers, each bringing examples of how their organisations, PMI included, are adopting AI in software development. Every organisation is doing it differently.
Brought in examples from Lexacon, including a full session on n8n. One of the group's main questioners on controls when members present what they're trying, from the tools used to measure impact to how token usage is managed. The group's input shapes PMI's own SDLC practices and its wider industry guidance.
2022 to 2023
AI & DataEngineering LeadershipData GovernanceVP, Customer Engineering, Vieu
Data ingestion rebuilt for graphs at tens of millions of nodes
Vieu was a data-focused sales augmentation platform in early growth. How it ingested and configured client data capped the size of client the customer engineering team could take on.
Rewrote the customer engineering processes and redesigned data ingestion and configuration for graphs at tens of millions of nodes. Data processing throughput went up 5x, and the existing team went on to onboard clients 20x larger than any before.
2019 to 2022
AI & DataAI TransformationCTO, Vetifly
First in-app helicopter charter pricing with upfront cost
Custom helicopter charters were priced by phone or email, with a turnaround of hours to two days. Pricing depended on rules that had never been written down: aircraft, helipads, routes, and constraints like night-time certification.
Spent weeks with our COO, who was also a helicopter pilot and safety officer, defining the master data before writing any logic. The result was the world's first algorithm for custom aircraft charter with upfront cost, shown instantly in the app.
2019 to 2022
Engineering LeadershipInfrastructure & SecurityCTO, Vetifly
Aviation platform and a 17-person remote team, built from scratch
Vetifly needed booking and flight execution systems across mobile, web and operations, and a team to build and run them, starting from nothing.
Designed and launched the booking and execution platforms, scaling to 12 daily trips on shared helicopter routes. Put remote working mechanics in place before COVID, then grew a fully remote team of 17 across 5 time zones, with CI/CD and a middle-management layer that grew engineers into IT business partners. Kept APIs on a separate domain so the apps and ops portal stayed up if the main site went down, and governed Microsoft 365 with SSO and IAM across entities and countries.
2011 to 2013
Programme LeadershipInfrastructure & SecurityData GovernanceIT Business Partner & Innovation Manager, Unilever
Global identity and access programme for 200K+ users
Unilever's Single Source of People Truth initiative needed one identity and access model for its global workforce, with joiner, mover and leaver processes that worked across functions and geographies.
Led the €12M global IAM programme, with about 150 people at programme level, giving secure access to 200K+ users. Sole IT member of the 3-person global team that defined every joiner, mover and leaver process with senior business stakeholders, and owned the data side of each step, including which employee data to collect at each stage.
2010 to 2011
AI & DataData GovernanceSystems Manager, Hindustan Unilever
Outlet-level recommendation engine for 18K+ salespeople
HUL wanted to give its general trade salespeople personalised guidance on which SKUs and what quantities to sell into each outlet, on the mobile devices they used in the field.
Part of the Sales CoE team that delivered Project iQ: an SAP BI-driven outlet-SKU recommendation engine sending personalised guidance to 18K+ salespeople via mobile. I owned all data flows between SAP and the field. It won global CIO recognition and was adopted across all of Unilever's general trade markets worldwide.
2021
Infrastructure & SecurityData GovernanceCTO, Vetifly
Encryption that kept customer data safe through a database intrusion
Before go-live, Vetifly held data on 1K+ high-net-worth customers on its waiting list, which made it a target. During a sustained attack, a default Postgres configuration left by an outsourced DevOps provider gave the attackers admin access to the database.
No customer data was exposed. I had already put 2-level encryption in place that only the application could decrypt at runtime, originally so developers with database access couldn't read customer data. The most the attackers could do was wipe the database. Restored from backups, fixed the configuration, and brought DevOps in-house with a full-time hire.
2007 to 2011
Programme LeadershipData GovernanceInfrastructure & SecuritySystems Manager, Hindustan Unilever
SAP rollouts, sales systems and master data across HUL's network
HUL was moving its manufacturing units from MfgPro to SAP, across own, 3P and 2P factories, while its sales systems for dealers, mobile and claims ran outside SAP across the distributor network.
Planned and delivered SAP rollouts across own, 3P and 2P manufacturing units, handling on-site migration for 5 units and defining SAP processes for white-label 2P units across India. Owned all SAP-to-non-SAP integrations across the distributor network, all non-SAP infrastructure, and master data for every sales initiative for 3 years, with all of India's sales data running through those systems. Led a team of 27, including skip-level reports.
2014 to 2016
Programme LeadershipInfrastructure & SecurityProject Manager, IBM
25K+ devices and enterprise security for Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi
Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi needed end-user IT and enterprise security delivered into clinical workflows, in a high-compliance healthcare environment, with several vendors working in parallel.
Led the deployment of 25K+ IT devices across the hospital within a structured PMO framework. Rolled out VMware VDI with tap-to-login so clinicians could move between workstations securely. Ran the enterprise security programme across MFA, NTP, FireEye malware protection, F5 load balancing and IAM, managing multiple vendor workstreams at once.
2023 to 2025
Governance & RiskInfrastructure & SecurityTechnical Debt Consultant, and Tech Advisor at Zoth
A 5-dimension framework for measuring technical debt
Startups and small teams inside larger organisations build up technical debt fast, mostly because there are no externally imposed processes. They rarely know how to measure it, so they can't weigh paying it back against shipping new features.
Developed a framework that sorts technical debt across 5 dimensions, from architecture to documentation, and puts a dollar value on it, so teams can aim for a healthy level of debt rather than zero. Applied it at Zoth, a crypto-to-RWA platform, reviewing smart contracts and multi-chain configurations by hand and closing security gaps left by intern-led development, and was then retained as tech advisor to the C-suite through multiple go-lives. Used it to guide 3 startups through technical due diligence for funding rounds.
2017 to 2019
Programme LeadershipGovernance & RiskCo-founder & CEO, Quikwork
UAE's first platform for short-term work
Short-term recruitment in the UAE came with regulatory requirements no platform had been built around, and Emirati freelancers had no easy route into short-term private sector work.
Defined the product and technology strategy and managed all vendor and delivery partners for a greenfield web and mobile platform that met UAE short-term recruitment rules. Advised MoHRE on documentation and technology frameworks to open short-term private sector work to Emirati freelancers, in line with emerging Emiratisation policy. Pitched to investors throughout, and exhibited Quikwork at startup events including GITEX.
2026 to present
AI & DataBuilder, happinews.blog
A live AI news app running for under $1 a month
A personal project to curate positive-impact news with AI, with each edition ready to post on Instagram, at close to zero running cost.
Designed, built and run the whole system solo with Claude Code, owning the full SDLC. 140+ editions published so far, with automated Instagram-ready exports, at under $1 a month in running costs. The main day-to-day user is non-technical, so the workflow had to work for someone other than the person who built it.
2026
AI TransformationAI & DataIndependent AI Advisor
Hybrid AI workflow proposal for a tier-1 construction contractor
A tier-1 GCC construction contractor wanted to speed up quantity estimation for tender bids and project changes, where engineers had to study engineering drawings and build a bill of quantities for each one.
Proposed a hybrid workflow: a vision-language model fine-tuned on the company's own historical drawings and BOQs to read the drawings, with deterministic logic for the BOQ rules, calls to their pricing tool, and posting the result into SAP. Included a delivery plan and an ROI case covering both the fine-tuning and the ongoing maintenance period. The client chose a different approach.