Led the development of a highly innovative product suite (SONAR) based around continuous analysis of a company’s communications – email, CRM, IM, blogs, wikis, etc - to provide the company with insight into the social network and the expertise of the individuals within it. This analysis powers an expertise search interface for the employees, and a “diagnostic” visualisation of the communication networks to the senior management.

- Designed and developed the SONAR system from an idea on a post-it through to enterprise rollouts and support
- Implemented a highly-scalable asynchronous processing architecture, combining JRuby commands for data processing in a JMS queue-based system with a standards-based Ruby on Rails front-end.
- Directed continual research and development in Natural Language Processing, data analysis, scaling, Social Network Analytics etc.
- Introduced VM-based deployment model that took implementation times down from days to hours.
- Grew the company rapidly by 400% in 3 years, taking the lead in tech team recruitment
- Main client-facing member of the technical team, leading the pre-sales implementation consultancy and post-sales support.
- Won awards including Oracle European Innovation Award, Red Herring Global Top 100, Gartner “Cool Vendor”, IDCs "Top 10 Most Innovative Software Companies <$100m"

Technical lead for an eight-member multi-disciplinary production team at Headshift, the UK’s market-leading Social Software consultancy. Overall responsibility for systems architecture, development standards and processes, while also owning and developing many projects from consultancy through planning, development and deployment.

- Lead developer and technical owner of the NIMHE Knowledge Community, winner of the 2005 International Information Industry award for Innovation in Knowledge Management. This system was notable for its automatic document relevance matching, among many other innovations.
- Implemented SVN version control system, development processes & release management system, and introduced the FliP methodology.
- Invited to speak several times at the UK Coldfusion User Group. Presentations included: Advanced Text Processing and Enhancing User Interfaces with AJAX & Coldfusion
- Developed innovative social software apps for clients including BP, Demos (Prospect Magazine Best Thinktank website 2006), the BBC, the NHS.
- Designed & developed a system to rapidly deploy custom-branded blog / wiki / tagging system / search systems, which could be up and running within 20 minutes.
- Won a place at BBC Innovation Labs 2006, with one of only 10 projects out of 170 that eventually won a BBC Commission.

Worked as part of a team of 5 developers on SmartGroups - a groundbreaking web-based global community application which grew to 3 million users throughout the world, and processed 50 million emails per month.

The system was entirely multilingual, and comprised a web front-end of around 3,500 Coldfusion templates with several CFX tags in C and Java, a custom-built mail server written in C (around 100,000 lines of code), and around 70,000 lines of Java code for back-end scheduled tasks.

Responsibilities included

- Re-engineering the entire application to achieve >99% service uptime and stability.
- Securing the admin system and developing back-end spam detection and monitoring.
- Replacing the UNIX C – based encryption mechanism of the mail server with a custom Java implementation of Dan Bernstein’s “cryptographic cookies”
- Completely redeveloped the calendar system to allow greater functionality, full internationalisation, and interoperability with other systems through iCal / vCal.
- Developing a system to detect copyright-infringing files camouflaged in uploaded images
- Architected the redevelopment of the system utilising an n-tier architecture to expose all actions as web services.
- The team also worked closely with Scotland Yard and the National Criminal Intelligence Service to investigate and provide evidence for criminal prosecutions based on SmartGroups activity. I implemented data-mining tools to capture evidence, and acted as the technical liaison for the operations team in these cases.

Managed and trained a team of 5 developers to create the Rocom X / Data Exchange project, an industry-wide system aimed at automating and managing the flow of product and pricing information across the whole Telecoms supply chain - from manufacturers and distributors to resellers and end users. This highly successful project is still in use, providing Telecoms suppliers such as BT, Panasonic & Siemens with a secure, web-based CMS for their product and pricing data, and instantly updating this information across a network of resellers’ websites .

- Distributed systems with multiple points of entry kept in-synch via XML.
- Every aspect of resellers’ sites and pricing structure configurable.
- Also responsible for architecture and development of several independent sites, particularly an e-commerce site for Beaverbrooks jewellers
- Used as a test case for the Extended Fusebox methodology – which later became FLiP.
- Extensive planning meant that the project was delivered two weeks ahead of schedule, with only two minor faults ever reported on this system.

Responsible for design and development of customer & in-house web based applications. Led a team of CF developers working on a wide range of applications, from Virtual Reality E-Commerce to highly complex and secure applications from sports betting to the defence industry, The role also involved a high degree of customer liaison, from pre-sales requirements gathering and business analysis to post-sales support and maintenance.

Rapidly progressed from trainee to Senior Analyst Programmer responsible for a team of five developers. The role involved leading the systems design, development, and ongoing maintenance of large bespoke systems, particularly a Service Management & Invoicing system for a multi-national manufacturing company. This application became the largest program ever written in Speedbase (the compiler overflowed at 100k lines!) with a 2yr dev cycle from conception to roll-out.

- Wrote development and maintenance procedures for successful ISO9000 Quality Audit.
- Also responsible for helpdesk, user support, customer liaison, and sysadmin on UNIX and PC/NT platforms.