I have spent twenty years building software, moving steadily deeper into the stack — full-stack web to begin with, and for the last decade the backend and platform layer: the ingestion pipelines, event systems, and APIs that have to stay reliable while everything around them changes.
Much of that work is high-throughput and asynchronous: webhook ingestion that stays fault-tolerant at tens of thousands of requests per second, the distributed pipelines that process those events and get them to the systems downstream — journalled so any one can be traced and replayed — and polling with deduplication, so downstream only sees a change when the source actually changed. The through-line is delivery you can trust: at scale, under failure, without losing or double-sending anything.
Most recently I am Tech Lead for the Connections team at Zapier, on the authentication layer that connects end users to the apps they rely on, and leading its separation from a legacy monolith. My focus is architecture — where logic lives, how domains decouple, how to evolve a large system without breaking the platform underneath. Alongside the systems work I build AI-assisted tooling, and think about how to make agentic workflows repeatable rather than improvised; some of that is in Writing.
What I care about: durable systems, honest engineering, and lifting the people around me.
Selected experience
Zapier · Senior platform engineer, now Tech Lead · 2019 to present
Grew from backend engineer to platform engineer to Tech Lead across the integration platform a large automation product runs on: high-throughput webhook ingestion and the async pipelines behind it, polling with deduplication, the outbound API edge (Tier 1, with metered access and rate limiting), request lineage and observability across services, and the auth layer now separating from a legacy monolith.
Fully Baked Ltd · Director · 2016 to 2019
Ran a web development and infrastructure consultancy, delivering CRMs, marketplaces, and content platforms in Ruby on Rails and PHP.
Dribbble · Software Engineer · 2017 to 2019
Integrated third-party recruitment tools into the platform and maintained the hiring product surface for the designer community.
Earlier · Crew Labs, freelance, Data Harvesting, and roles going back to 1999, spanning CRM platforms, e-marketing systems, and application infrastructure.
Community
Co-founded PHP Dorset and PHP South Coast, a regional user group and a conference for first-time speakers, and spent several years speaking at developer events. More recently I volunteered with The Collab Lab, mentoring early-career developers and automating the programme's cohort setup.