Summary
I'm a Principal Engineer at Co-op, where I lead four teams building and running the online grocery business, about 10% of Co-op's Food business revenue. My day-to-day spans everything from setting technical direction and representing engineering in business forums, to staying close enough to the code to have an informed opinion on it.
I've spent the last decade building systems where reliability genuinely matters: national road and rail infrastructure at Thales, and increasingly complex e-commerce at Co-op. That background shapes how I think about risk, rollout, and the gap between "works in testing" and "works at scale."
I care about making teams effective as much as making systems reliable: good observability, sensible on-call, automated pipelines, and a decision-making culture grounded in data rather than instinct.
Experience
Co-op TechnologySept 2020 – Present
Co-op is one of the UK's largest consumer co-operatives, operating across food retail, funeralcare, insurance, and legal services. I joined Co-op Digital in 2020 and have since held three roles of increasing seniority, progressing from Lead Engineer to Principal Engineer across three distinct business areas.
Principal Engineer — Q-CommerceMay 2024 – Present
I lead four engineering teams responsible for different aspects of Co-op's Q-Commerce business, which accounts for just under 10% of Co-op's Food business revenue. The teams cover:
- coop.co.uk — brochureware and marketing sites
- shop.coop.co.uk — a Next.js site hosted on Vercel providing Co-op's first-party online grocery service
- eComm Platform — backend data loading and transactional services for shop.coop.co.uk
- eComm Partnerships — transactional and product feeds to Just Eat, Deliveroo, Uber Eats, and Starship
Over the past year I have led the re-platforming of our headless eCommerce solution from Naveo to Salesforce Commerce Cloud, which has also included the launch of Amazon MFG (Merchant Fulfilled Grocery). The migration spans multiple teams across Co-op and has been designed to be completely transparent to customers and in-store colleagues. The frontend integration is developed behind a feature flag in shop.coop.co.uk, and the backend services are built to route orders through either platform, arriving to colleagues identically regardless of which system processed them. This approach allows us to incrementally roll out the new platform in a safe, controlled way.
Principal Engineer — FuneralcareSept 2022 – May 2024
Funeralcare operates across two areas: a financially regulated pre-need business selling funeral plans, and an at-need business supporting clients through funeral arrangement. I led teams in both of these business areas. I joined to support the business in migrating multiple pre-need customer journeys into Microsoft Dynamics 365, improving regulatory compliance and resilience over the previous system.
I also worked closely with the web teams to bring the pre-need and at-need sites closer together, both technically and visually. Within the constraints of the regulated business, I led the team to develop a shared set of reusable components used across the CMS, which involved auditing, deprecating, migrating, and building flexible, robust components.
Lead Engineer — Q-CommerceAug 2021 – Sept 2022
I led a team to migrate all server interactions in shop.coop.co.uk into a backend-for-frontend (BFF) layer, enabling detailed monitoring and observability through consistent wrappers. This laid the groundwork for a low-risk migration from a legacy Naveo platform to their latest offering, which involved a completely reworked authentication mechanism. Feature-flagging the migration behind the BFF significantly reduced delivery risk, and the observability improvements gave us confidence the systems were behaving as expected throughout.
Lead Engineer — One WebSept 2020 – Aug 2021
I led the team delivering the majority of Co-op's websites, handling 45 million requests per week. I led the migration from legacy infrastructures, including Elastic Beanstalks and a manually created Kubernetes cluster, into an AWS platform-as-a-service offering. The transition was transparent to users and over halved the total infrastructure cost of the platform.
Thales — Ground Transportation SystemsSept 2014 – Sept 2020
Across six years at Thales I worked on large-scale, safety-critical systems in the transport sector, progressing from full stack development to leading front-end teams. I was recognised as a senior engineer and regularly engaged across the business on web technologies, UI development, and DevOps practices. I represented the local development community in a nationally recognised UI & GIS Specialist Engineering Team, sharing knowledge across Thales' business lines.
Key projects included:
TIRIS — Predictive MaintenanceFront End Web Engineer, May 2018 – Sept 2020
Led front-end development on a rail industry data analytics platform aimed at reducing unplanned maintenance to zero. Introduced API testing, static analysis, and automated performance testing into the build pipelines. Built on a microservice architecture in Microsoft Azure.
London Underground — 4LM ProgrammeSoftware Integration Engineer, Sept 2016 – May 2018
Led software delivery for a control system as part of a €1bn project bringing record capacity to the Underground network. Maintained the CI platform, managed releases across test and production environments, and acted as a conduit between engineering teams across multiple locations.
Highways England — National Traffic Information ServiceFull Stack Developer, Sept 2014 – Sept 2016
Worked on a system managing England's strategic road network, collecting near real-time data to help operators direct traffic across almost 5,000 roadside message signs. Built in Java, Spring, Hibernate, and Oracle RAC. Also served on the out-of-hours support rota, responsible for restoring operational service during incidents.
Skills
Leadership & Communication: Engineering leadership at department level, technical strategy and roadmap setting, representing engineering in business forums, translating complex technical challenges for non-technical stakeholders, coaching and mentoring, hiring, performance management.
Delivery: Data-guided decision making, secure software development, feature flagging, automated CI/CD pipelines, Agile methodologies, Atlassian tooling (Jira, Confluence).
Observability & Incidents: Designing on-call processes, automated alerting, runbook development, incident response.
Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS, Microsoft Azure, Vercel, with a focus on cost-conscious architecture and platform efficiency.
Web Technologies: Next.js, TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Tailwind.
Education
BSc Software Engineering | Manchester Metropolitan University | Sept 2011 – Aug 2014