The leadership story

Principal Polyglot Software Engineer & Architect, Strategic Engineering · Faria Education Group

Nov 2017 — present

• Originated and architected the company's AI platform: governed, versioned, auditable AI operations consumed by ManageBac, OpenApply and Atlas, across OpenAI, Azure, Anthropic, Bedrock and Chinese providers, with a separate China deployment
• Built the platform's safety and audit line: adversarial red-team evaluation, an AI-firewall middleware and a byte-level auditing AI gateway; migrated 46 production AI operations across model generations
• Designed the product AI agent architecture: a role-routed assistant over a fleet of small in-app MCP servers, with a written MCP tool-design doctrine
• Founded the data platform: a prototype that disproved embedded BI, then a medallion warehouse on S3/Athena/Glue and the Faria Spotlight analytics product, live in three AWS regions; now a second-generation warehouse designed for LLM-grounded analytics
• Founding architect and tech lead of MiniPD, a coaching marketplace: 14-app Elixir umbrella, Stripe Connect payments with a double-entry ledger, video sessions and chat
• Built the exam-systems services in Elixir: account linking and messaging, near-duplicate detection realising my own 2018 RFC, conversion services, ingestion pipelines
• Built a .NET 7 document-processing daemon (DOCX to PDF, table repair, PDF merging) driven from Elixir over a Unix domain socket, and vendored it into the product that needed it in place of a Python and LibreOffice pipeline
• Polyglot by need rather than preference: Ruby inside the Rails products my Elixir services integrate with, and Ruby client libraries for two of those services; Python for the Airflow and dbt analytics stack I architected in 2026 and for an OAuth2-scoped MCP server built inside a Django monolith in two days
• Standing roles: AI strategy; founding member of the internal AI Ethics Board; technical advisor to leadership on AI, platform and M&A; hands-on technical due diligence; cross-department consulting architect
• Pioneered agent-assisted delivery: designed and ran an agentic SDLC, proven by building a complete production-grade product sole-author in 30 days with 1,390 automated tests
• Owned technical hiring for the division for seven years

Director of Engineering (part-time) · Enzai

Oct 2022 — Oct 2023

• Engineering leadership through the early start-up phase of an AI-governance software company, alongside my Faria role
• Established data-security controls and engineering processes
• Led systems design and optimisation of the Elixir/AWS platform; designed and shipped product features hands-on as part of a fast-paced, creative engineering team

R&D Lead & Technical Consultant · L&T Infotech, consulting at Citi

Jun 2010 — Jun 2011

• Lead developer on the middle-tier overhaul of an account system with 40,000+ active users, in Citi's Architecture & Technology Division
• Introduced TDD, unit testing and automated regression testing; trained developers; consulted by senior staff on process improvement

ASDLC: an agentic software development lifecycle

Apr 2026 — present

Technical hiring programme

Jul 2019 — present

MiniPD coaching marketplace

Feb 2020 — Aug 2022