The Lore - A 15+ Year Obsession for Building Complex Systems
I started at age 9, teaching myself to code, build, and run RuneScape private servers and gold-farming bots. I scaled this passion to building and managing large communities for SAMP, ArmA, Minecraft, and Garry's Mod servers.
At 15, I architected a multi-part GTA 4 mod (LCPD) using a C# application, a core game mod, a MySQL database, and a linked phpBB forum. At 17, I cold-called my way into my first professional role at CANDDi.
My entire career has been a continuation of this lore: joining high-risk, early-stage startups as the first hire (Nossa Data, Tessian, BUMP) and scaling their "move-fast" MVP code into secure, "Bank of England"-grade platforms.
I've been the first engineer three times. I know what "first hire" code looks like. I know the shortcuts you took to ship fast. I know which ones will kill you at scale and which ones are fine.
- Years Building Systems
- 15+
- Startups as First Engineer
- 3
- Employees at Scale (Tessian)
- 200+
Experience - The First Engineer Pattern
I've been the first technical hire at three startups. Each time, I joined when the code was "move-fast" and left when it was "enterprise-grade." Here's what that looked like.
- Tessian (Employee #11). Joined as the first client-side engineer when the company was <15 people. Helped scale to 200+ employees (Sequoia, Accel, Balderton backed; later acquired by Proofpoint). Deployed to the Bank of England and Dentons using on-premise Ansible scripts. Led migration of flagship Outlook Add-in from VB.NET to modern C#. Co-engineered a high-throughput email gateway (MTA) with full Concourse CI/CD pipeline.
- BUMP (YC W18). First engineer hired by the CTO to rebuild the backend. The entire system was a single-file Parse.js app. Migrated to NestJS + GraphQL API. Architected a CQRS-based event-driven order system for a StockX-like marketplace handling millions in transactions. Managed SCRUM and led the hiring pipeline.
- Nossa Data. First hire. Delivered the 2-week MVP (FastAPI, React, Next.js, AWS) to onboard 12 pilot companies including Toyota and Vodafone for ShareAction WDI. Promoted to Head of Engineering. Scaled platform to 170+ companies and 1000+ users in 6 weeks. Led full ISO27001 security refactor: migrated from single AWS account to multi-account org with SSO, implemented Teleport for database access, used Pulumi for IaC.
Open Source
I'm a core maintainer of Haraka, a high-performance open-source SMTP server written in Node.js. I'm responsible for code review, architecture, and security of the core networking and email-parsing engine.
When I audit your code, I'm reviewing it with the same standards I apply to production email infrastructure used by companies worldwide.
Current Work
I'm currently building shuto.app, an "AllTrails for Drivers" iOS-native app from scratch in Swift. I'm architecting a Supabase backend (TypeScript) for auth, database, and storage, self-hosting a custom routing server on Hetzner with OSM data, and developing a Python-based recommendation engine.
I'm also available for technical audits and select consulting engagements.
Ready to scale your MVP or audit your technical foundation?
Based in
- London
3rd Floor, 86-90 Paul Street, London
England, United Kingdom, EC2A 4NE