I started out as an infrastructure engineer and spent the first part of my career learning how technology actually works at the component level - virtualisation, networking, platform operations.

Over time, my focus shifted from building things to designing them, and then from designing them to understanding why organisations struggle to govern and sustain them at scale.

That shift is the thread that runs through everything below.

Microsoft » Cloud Solution Architect

January 2023 – present

I work as a Cloud Solution Architect in the Digital and App Innovation team within Microsoft’s Customer Success Unit, focused on a major UK financial infrastructure account.

The core of the role is helping a large, complex organisation manage its Azure platform - not just technically, but structurally. That means working across engineering, architecture, and leadership teams to ensure that platform decisions are well-governed, risks are visible, and the organisation can sustain what it builds over time.

The most significant work I’ve done here goes beyond the standard CSU remit. I’ve built a structured framework and associated tooling around Azure service retirement - a problem that sounds like routine change management but is, in practice, a governance and ownership problem. When a retirement notice lands, the question isn’t just “what needs to be upgraded?” It’s “who owns this, what’s the deadline, what’s the blast radius, and what happens if we do nothing?” Most organisations don’t have a clean answer to those questions. I built tooling to help answer them at scale, and a framework to turn retirement signals into managed, owned work - rather than reactive fire-fighting when deadlines arrive.

Amazon Web Services » Specialist Solutions Architect, Container Technologies

September 2018 – November 2022

I joined the AWS containers specialist team focused on Amazon ECS, EKS, and Fargate, and over four years served as Acting Tech Lead for the EMEA Containers business. Over that period, the business grew from a seven-figure to a nine-figure run rate.

When Amazon EKS launched in 2018, I identified and onboarded the first EMEA customers, captured early feedback, and worked directly with the service team to get that feedback into the product roadmap. That pattern - working at the boundary between customers and product, translating real-world problems into product requirements - became a defining part of how I operated throughout my time at AWS.

The technical work ranged from cellular cluster architecture (reducing blast radius for high-availability applications) to large-scale financial services migrations running 100,000+ vCPUs per cluster, where the interesting problems were in CNI tuning, observability, and application-level scale optimisation rather than the migration itself. I presented this work at AWS re:Invent 2020.

Beyond the customer work, I built the Containers Atlas - an internal knowledge base designed to democratise tribal knowledge across the EMEA SA community - and grew a network of 115 container SMEs across EMEA, personally mentoring 15 of them into the community. The team itself grew from two Specialist SAs and one BDM to ten SAs and eight BDMs during my time.

Amazon Web Services » Solutions Architect

September 2015 – September 2018

My first three years at AWS were as a generalist SA, working across Retail, Digital Native, and Start-up customers in the UK. This is where I developed the habit of engaging broadly across AWS services before specialising - and where I first started to see the patterns that later shaped my thinking on governance and platform sustainability.

Earlier career

Before AWS, I spent five years in consulting at DMW Group (now Credera) and Accenture, working across Financial Services, Travel, Government, and Technology clients on infrastructure transformation, technology strategy, and platform delivery. The consulting years gave me the commercial and stakeholder fluency that technical roles alone rarely do - working across executive, legal, and risk functions on complex programmes, and learning to translate between technical detail and business consequence.

Before that, I was at Metaswitch Networks as a Virtualisation Specialist, where I designed and ran a multi-site VMware platform hosting 500+ VMs - an early lesson in the operational realities of running infrastructure at scale, and in the value of evangelising new approaches to sceptical organisations.

I read Materials Science at Oxford, which sounds like an odd background for a cloud architect - but it instilled a habit of reasoning from first principles and a tolerance for ambiguity that has been more useful than any specific technical credential.

A full chronological CV is available on request.