Career
My skillset comprises people management, project management, software engineering, process modelling, high throughput + low latency systems, and beyond
the tl;dr
🧪 I’m a chemical engineer because my mum is a pharmacist and my dad is an engineer
⛔️ Chemical engineers occasionally kill people, so they make good risk managers
🏦 So I went into financial risk management
👨💻 The tools were bad, so I wrote my own
📔 I learned to code by borrowing the dev team’s university textbooks
💸 I made fintech trading tools for a while
🍜 Then I built a startup
👨👩👧👦 Most of that time required social skills (leading people, bringing people together, mentoring, evangelising, pitching ideas, etc)
🧘 These days, I channel my skills into building engineering teams
My Technical Skills
Learning doesn’t stop. Software Engineering is still a nascent field. It is an exciting time to be an engineer, so I am still interested in learning about new technologies
Experience
The world’s largest sport-betting shops use an off-the-shelf betting engine (aka sportsbook). Many companies have tried building their own sportsbook and failed. Ours went live in February 2024. We built it in three years (including the teams). As the old Google motto used to say, “the most important job at Google is hiring”.
SENIOR ENGINEERING MANAGER
Promoted to a senior management role. Tasked with leading Kindred's .net teams.
PEOPLE
- oversaw project go-live
- oversaw buyout by FDJ, largely a result of our technical success
- managed retention, engagement, staff career progression
- performance-managed underperforming staff members
- developed a leadership team
- drove the standardisation of technologies, where necessary
- drove cross-team technical uplift (NFRs, best practices)
ENGINEERING MANAGER
Founded the company's highest-performing team.
PEOPLE
- took the sportsbook project from inception to go-live
- hired the entire team, kept low churn over three years
- created a high-collaboration, high-trust, environment; a centre of excellence
- created an atmosphere of sharing and trust across teams, promoting agility
TECH
- built software designed to be deployed and supported across the globe
- typescript, postgres + nosql, kafka, jenkins, kubernetes/helm
- built the core bet placement, risk assessment, and bet settlement journeys
- the engine places hundreds of bets per second, settles thousands
- handled customers' money & personally identifiable information
- set the bar for software quality across the entire company:
- automated unit/integration/component/load/smoke tests
- fast, automated, ephemeral, E2E tests
- automated semantic versioning & conventional commits
- rapid, powerful, cicd pipelines
- historical tracking of software performance
LEAD ENGINEER
Emil Koutanov helped to take our startup to the next level. I wanted to work with him again, and this was the opportunity. Symbio had an excellent architect (Emil) and an excellent head of engineering (Dion Beetson), and I wanted to learn from them. I took on an existing team that needed some help. Over two years, the team built a greenfield, full-stack, B2B CMS, from scratch with little churn. Thanks to the strong leadership above, excellent technology choices were made early on. As such, the stack was great.
Telco was cool, but I wanted to be closer to the money (similar to fintech), so I left.
PEOPLE
- Built up the team, kept low churn
- Performance managed underperforming staff
- Drove technical leadership
- Championed cross-team relationships
TECH
- React SPA, Go 1.14, postgres + nosql, kafka, aws/terraform
CTO
I came back to Sydney, and decided to change pace. I joined a startup in it's nascent stage. We started with a marketplace website (foenix.co) focusing on boutique products. We made an iOS social app, similar to Instagram, where users could buy boutique products.
The problem was that advertising our products on Facebook was super expensive (cost-per-click). It turned out far cheaper to work directly with influencers. But which influencer to choose? And so, Lumio was born. We wrote a massive analytical engine, capable of analysing the demographics of influencers' entire audiences. Businesses could then decide which influencers best fit their needs.
In the end, three years later, we ran out of cash. Cambridge Analytica changed how the world worked with APIs, and our business model was no longer viable. InfluencerDB bought us at a discount.
PEOPLE
- Pitched to board and investors
- Developed the engineering roadmap
- Built the engineering team
- Drove the technical vision to success
TECH
- React SPA, PHP7 + HHVM (facebook's JIT compiler), RabbitMQ, SpaCy
- 2.4TB MongoDB cluster on AWS
- Hundreds of micro AWS instances managed using Ansible
SOFTWARE DEVELOPER
I moved to the UK with the gf. Again, I worked as a software developer. This time on the trading floor of VTB, Russia's biggest investment bank. I developed automated trading software for equity market making across European exchanges. The desk contributed ￡5m p.a. to the bank’s bottom line.
We travelled some more and eventually moved back to Australia.
TECH
- Excel, VBA, C#, GL Trade / Sungard
2007-2012
Liquid Capital
Sydney, Australia
TACTICAL DEVELOPER
I was the first software developer to work on Liquid's trading floor, and the first to work with C#. My role was to sit alongside traders and build trading software. I acted as a mix of engineer, trader, PO, and QA. My work increased the profitability of the ASX Equities Desk by 25% ($3m AUD p.a.), by developing trade execution and risk monitoring tools. The majority of the revenue came from a tool that I built, using traders' volatility-adjusted option prices to calculate ASX strategy prices + look for edge + trigger execution.
After four years at Liquid I wanted to travel, so I left. To this day, I am grateful for this formative role. I worked with amazing people like Mladen Mitic, Mike Grasso, Damian Smith, James Swift, David Dight, and many brilliant engineers, to which I am indebted.
TECH
- C#, WinForms, ADO.NET, LINQ, DockPanel Suite, SQLite, Perforce
RISK MANAGER
After graduating from university, I joined Liquid Capital as a risk manager. I didn't like the Excel/VBA based risk management software used by Liquid globally, so I decided to write my own. I asked the dev team to borrow their university textbooks, and I learned to code C/C++/C#. Six months later, I had rebuilt the software. It was faster, safer, and more collaborative.
The CTO (Giles Forster) was impressed, so he offered me a role as a software developer, and I took it with both hands.
TECH
- Excel, VBA, C#, VSTO (check the gif on the right)
2003-2008
University of Sydney
Sydney, Australia
Bachelor of Engineering (chemical)
My family comprises medical professionals and engineers. My mum has worked as a pharmacist at Concord Hospital for over twenty years. So a chemical engineering degree was a surprise to no one. It was very rewarding to "learn how to learn". It gave me the confidence to read whole textbooks, which was essential to my engineering career. Engineering degrees, not being based on first-principles (unlike science) inevitably require modelling, which has also been very valuable in my career. Crucially, I did some coding in Matlab as part of my degree, which gave me my first taste of programming. I loved it 🧑💻