Selected case studies demonstrating technical depth and problem-solving approach.
A growing internet security company providing content filtering and threat protection for schools, businesses, and home users needed to scale its technical operations. The platform processes billions of DNS requests and web filtering decisions daily, requiring high availability, low latency, and continuous updates to threat intelligence. The organisation needed senior technical leadership to drive architecture decisions, improve platform reliability, and build engineering capabilities.
Took on CTO responsibilities including architecture oversight, infrastructure strategy, and engineering team leadership. Redesigned core filtering infrastructure for improved throughput and reduced latency. Implemented robust CI/CD pipelines and automated testing. Established monitoring and observability practices across the platform. Led development of new product features including enhanced reporting and policy management. Mentored engineering team and established technical standards and review processes.
Platform now handles 10B+ daily requests with 99.99% uptime. Reduced average filtering decision latency to under 5ms. Improved deployment frequency from monthly to multiple times per week. Built scalable infrastructure supporting rapid customer growth across education and enterprise segments. Established engineering practices that enable the team to ship features confidently and respond quickly to emerging threats.
A financial compliance platform was experiencing reliability issues due to a monolithic architecture running on aging infrastructure. Database performance degraded under load, deployments required scheduled downtime, and the codebase had become difficult to maintain. The team needed to modernise the platform while maintaining regulatory compliance and zero data loss.
Conducted a thorough architecture review and developed a phased migration plan. Decomposed the monolith into bounded services, starting with the most problematic components. Migrated database workloads to managed PostgreSQL with read replicas. Implemented event-driven patterns for inter-service communication. Built CI/CD pipelines for automated testing and deployment. Established observability with distributed tracing and structured logging.
Reduced 95th percentile response times from 2.5 seconds to under 200ms. Eliminated scheduled downtime entirely through blue-green deployments. Improved database query performance by 10x through schema optimisation and read replica distribution. Reduced incident count by 70% through improved observability and automated alerting. Platform achieved SOC 2 Type II compliance during the engagement.
A healthcare analytics company needed to process millions of clinical events per day with sub-minute latency for real-time alerting. Existing batch processing systems ran overnight, making timely intervention impossible. The solution required HIPAA compliance, high availability, and the ability to handle schema evolution without data loss.
Designed and implemented a real-time streaming data pipeline using Kafka for event ingestion and stream processing. Built schema registry for event versioning and validation. Implemented stream processors in Go for data transformation and enrichment. Deployed ClickHouse for time-series analytics queries. Created monitoring dashboards and alerting based on clinical thresholds. Worked with compliance team to implement encryption, access controls, and audit logging.
Reduced data processing latency from 12+ hours to under 30 seconds. Pipeline processes 5M+ events per day with 99.9% uptime. Enabled new real-time alert features that improved patient outcomes. System passed HIPAA compliance audit with zero findings. Team successfully operates the pipeline with minimal intervention due to comprehensive observability and self-healing capabilities.
An established e-commerce platform was running on manually provisioned infrastructure with limited automation. Deployments required coordination between multiple teams and took hours. Infrastructure costs were escalating, and the team lacked visibility into resource utilisation. Black Friday traffic caused regular outages due to inability to scale quickly.
Migrated infrastructure to Kubernetes on AWS EKS. Codified all infrastructure as Terraform modules with automated CI/CD deployment. Implemented horizontal pod autoscaling based on CPU and custom metrics. Set up GitOps workflow using ArgoCD for application deployments. Built cost visibility dashboards and right-sized workloads based on actual usage. Implemented blue-green deployments and automated rollback procedures.
Reduced deployment time from 4 hours to 15 minutes with zero-downtime releases. Infrastructure costs decreased 35% through right-sizing and autoscaling. Platform successfully handled 5x Black Friday traffic spike with automatic scaling. Team velocity increased as developers gained self-service deployment capabilities. Mean time to recovery dropped from hours to minutes through automated rollback.
A B2B SaaS company needed to expose internal services to third-party developers through a public API. Requirements included versioning, rate limiting, authentication, comprehensive documentation, and SLA guarantees. The existing internal APIs were inconsistent and not designed for external consumption.
Designed RESTful API architecture with consistent resource patterns and error handling. Implemented API gateway for authentication, rate limiting, and request routing. Built versioning strategy to allow backward-compatible evolution. Created OpenAPI specifications and auto-generated documentation. Developed SDKs in Python, JavaScript, and Go. Implemented comprehensive monitoring with SLA tracking and customer-facing status page.
Successfully launched API platform with 50+ enterprise customers in first quarter. API achieved 99.95% uptime SLA with automated alerting on budget consumption. Developer satisfaction scores exceeded 8/10 based on documentation and SDK quality. Rate limiting prevented abuse while maintaining good developer experience. API became primary growth driver with 40% of revenue attributed to API-enabled integrations.
Projects are scoped based on desired outcomes, not fixed deliverables. This allows flexibility to adjust approach as understanding deepens.
Work can range from short advisory engagements (2-4 weeks) through to long-term embedded roles (6+ months). Fractional CTO and ongoing advisory relationships are also available.
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