Adimension Founder

January 2005 — current Sydney

My own consultancy and the home for my independent work — fractional CTO and advisory engagements, contract delivery, and open-source projects. Originally a full-time solo practice from 2005 to 2010, delivering 10+ full-stack engagements for small businesses and startups and owning everything from client acquisition and pre-sales through to architecture, development and support. It remains the vehicle for my consulting, contracting and open-source work between and alongside permanent roles, and it is what I am doing now.

Feedwell CTO

March 2026 — September 2026 Sydney

Sydney's leading corporate catering company — 360+ suburbs, $18M revenue, 190+ staff — and until recently the entire operation ran on Google Sheets. I was brought in as the most senior technology hire to change that, owning the technology function end to end, reporting to the founders and working alongside operations, logistics and finance. The core is an operations platform running invoicing, warehousing, product and people management: React and Node/TypeScript on GCP with Redis and Pub/Sub, deployed through Terraform and GitHub CI.

• Rebuilt the engineering foundations — parallel CI that cut a 27-minute feedback loop, trunk-based deployment, and review standards. The team went from shipping weekly with manual processes to nightly deploys, automated end to end.
• Built the testing foundation that makes agent-driven development safe: from no E2E coverage and broken pipelines to 300+ E2E tests, 2,000+ unit tests, scenario-based seeders, and integration tests for Redis locks and Pub/Sub.
• Made the engineering practice AI-first with a custom agent harness — human-in-the-loop agents run nightly to detect and reproduce flaky tests, categorise failures and triage issues through Playwright, updating, commenting and tagging as they go.
• Built a unified observability and signal pipeline — Sentry, GCP monitoring, Terraform-provisioned alerting, performance metrics and automated security scanning with Trivy, Strix and React Doctor — feeding production health into one place for engineers and agents to act on.

8seats CTO

August 2024 — March 2026 Sydney

An early-stage communications platform: WhatsApp's simplicity with the enterprise-grade management of Slack and Teams. I took it from an unstable proof of concept to production — a ground-up rewrite in Elixir/Phoenix and React Native on real-time WebSockets, event-driven messaging and fault-tolerant supervision trees, replacing an AWS Amplify v1 system that crashed and corrupted data.

• Re-architected around OTP supervision and event-driven messaging so failures isolate instead of cascade. On a high-volume messaging platform a lost or corrupted message is a lost customer; fault tolerance isn't a nice-to-have, it is the product.
• Built the testing foundation from nothing — zero to 2,500+ tests across Maestro E2E, React Native Testing Library and ExUnit, with scenario-based seeders and a Docker-in-Docker harness running identically in CI and locally.
• Architected the backend as a true distributed system: Elixir's clustering meant the ECS containers behaved as one cohesive cluster with a distributed cache, giving real-time delivery the latency and horizontal scale a messaging platform lives or dies on.
• Partnered with founders and board to turn business priorities into architecture decisions and delivery milestones, balancing velocity against long-term technical integrity.

Wovnn Co-Founder & CTO

September 2022 — September 2024 Australia

Co-founded an internal mobility platform for the education sector. Led all architecture and engineering from inception to a working proof of concept presented to Torrens University — a social matching engine in Elixir with AI/ML over a custom Rust graph database, purpose-built to model people-skills-role relationships beyond keyword matching.

Experience Digital CTO

March 2019 — July 2024 Surry Hills

Five years as consultant and fractional CTO across 50+ clients — startups, scale-ups, enterprise and government — leading engagements end to end from discovery and pre-sales through delivery, across AWS, Azure and GCP. The practice earned AWS Startup Partner of the Year and Microsoft Gold Partner status during this period.

• Won and delivered $1M+ government and enterprise platforms, including GNB NSW's authoritative place-naming system — a governed data source used by 128 councils and emergency services — and AWH's national supply chain platform.
• Led complex legacy modernisations end to end, including AWH's migration off on-premise IBM AS400 systems onto AWS, rearchitecting the applications, data and infrastructure that run a national logistics operation shipping the majority of Australia's wool.
• Ran cloud architecture and DevOps across the client portfolio — Terraform CDK in TypeScript and Go over AWS, Azure and GCP — migrating clients off cost- and performance-heavy Firebase and Vercel setups onto AWS.
• Led pre-sales end to end — discovery, architecture reviews, solution documentation, POC planning — for stakeholders from engineering teams through to C-suite, and managed engineers across onshore and offshore teams on concurrent engagements.

United Nations Development Programme Software Engineer & Analyst

March 2018 — September 2018 International

Contracted by the UNDP to design and build the digital platform for the Tuvalu Coastal Adaptation Project, a US$40M Green Climate Fund initiative. Translated complex climate science data into accessible digital narratives alongside local and international science teams, integrating managed and headless CMS systems with a performance and SEO strategy that amplified Tuvalu's climate story to policymakers, donors and a global audience.

WWF-Australia Lead Developer & Solutions Architect

January 2015 — March 2019 Ultimo

Led architecture and development for Australia's largest conservation organisation across four years — first as sole infrastructure architect for the entire digital estate, then leading development of the e-commerce and donation platforms processing $50M+ a year. As architect I built Azure infrastructure-as-code with Terraform across 5+ domains: CI/CD, auto-scaling and multi-region redundancy that kept platforms online through Earth Hour traffic surges reaching millions of hits, plus a hybrid Azure/on-premise cloud and the real-time Firebase layer behind the giving platform. As lead developer I made giving faster and more reliable — sub-second checkout, metadata-driven personalisation, and PCI-DSS and PII handling across platforms.

HSC Security Security Engineer

January 2014 — December 2014 Sydney

Security assessments and penetration testing for major clients including Westfield — finding and fixing vulnerabilities across networks, applications and embedded systems. Built automation tooling that replaced manual assessment processes and cut per-rack assessment time from hours to minutes.

Peach Software QA Engineer

January 2010 — September 2013 Bella Vista

Owned test automation, infrastructure and performance optimisation across desktop and web applications on the full .NET stack, building automated test suites and end-to-end tests that gave product and engineering teams fast feedback, while supporting the migration from on-premise infrastructure to hybrid cloud.