I am an engineering leader with 10+ years running technical teams, the largest being the
9-person agency I founded and grew from a university project. I have hired, onboarded, run
1:1s and performance reviews, owned budgets and client relationships, and built in-house
engineering functions from scratch. I stay hands-on with infrastructure, CI/CD, and cloud,
and I have introduced AI tooling into engineering teams: Claude Code and agentic coding in
the daily workflow, MCP servers for internal tools, and automated code review and data
analysis. I took a deliberately hands-on role at Conker to work with data at a scale I had
not handled before, and I am now looking to return to leading a team as an Engineering
Manager or Head of Engineering.
Leadership & Management
- Hiring & Onboarding
- 1:1s & Performance Management
- Mentoring & Career Progression
- Stakeholder Management
- Project Scoping & Delivery
- Budget Ownership
Technical
- Linux
- AWS, Azure & GCP
- Ansible & Terraform
- Kubernetes & Docker
- CI/CD
- PHP / Laravel
AI & Automation
- Claude Code
- Agentic Coding
- Prompt Engineering
- Model Context Protocol (MCP)
- MCP Server Development
- LLM Tool Design
- AI-Assisted Code Review
- Automated Data Analysis
Nottingham, UK (Remote)
Conker Group turns real-time point-of-sale data from UK retailers into insights for FMCG brands and their national account teams, within minutes of the data arriving.
The platform runs on AWS with a PHP 8.4 codebase, EC2 Mac instances, and Vagrant for local environments, and I use Claude Code and MCP servers day to day.
I work on the data import pipelines, handling millions of data points a day, and led the migration of the legacy codebase from PHP 5.3 to 8.4. Alongside that I built the team's reproducible development environment, look after the macOS estate and its egress proxy, and ran an internal security audit and penetration test, fixing what it found including several GDPR gaps. I brought AI into the team's daily work: agentic coding as part of the workflow, MCP servers for internal tools, and automated AI passes for code review and data analysis.
- ETL / Data Pipelines
- Large-Scale Data Processing
- PHP
- Legacy Migration
- Vagrant
- MCP Server Development
- LLM Tool Design
- Token Usage Optimisation
- AI-Assisted Code Review
- Automated Data Analysis
Lincoln, UK
Origin Amenity Solutions supplies turf care and plant health products to greenkeepers, grounds managers, and local authorities across the UK. It also owns MachineKeeper, a SaaS platform for equipment inspections, and the legacy TurfKeeper platform, which together serve thousands of golf courses across Europe and tens of thousands of users.
Infrastructure was Ansible and Terraform across Google Cloud, Azure, and Cloudflare, with Laravel on the application side and CI/CD pipelines across both.
I was brought in as the sole engineer to build MachineKeeper from scratch, owning the engineering function and reporting into the leadership team. I introduced Git, CI/CD, and standard backups to the business, ran backup servers across providers behind Cloudflare to prevent downtime, managed the external teams we worked with, and migrated TurfKeeper from unmanaged Azure VMs onto infrastructure as code in Google Cloud.
- Laravel
- FilamentPHP
- Flutter
- Project Management
- MySQL
- GIT
- Ansible
- Tofu / Terraform
Tamworth, UK
Flo provides recruitment software, payroll, back-office services, and invoice financing to UK temporary recruitment agencies across healthcare, education, industrial, and construction.
The estate was 180 VMs in AWS managed with Ansible, with CI/CD pipelines in front of a Laravel platform on PHP 8.1.
I was hired to move development in-house, replacing a 7-person agency team with 3 internal engineers whom I helped hire and then onboarded. I took ownership of CI/CD, deployment workflows, and dev environments, and ran the team day to day through standups, regular 1:1s, code review, and mentoring, supporting one engineer from junior to senior. Regular stakeholder meetings kept the business informed and brought its decisions back to the team.
- Laravel
- FilamentPHP
- GIT
- Ansible
- AWS
- Project Management
- Legacy Code Refactoring
- Team Leadership
Kingston Upon Hull, UK
Claret-Scott & Co is my own consultancy, working directly with UK businesses on bespoke software, security, and GDPR. It is also the company behind enhost, the award-winning web hosting business I have run since 2016.
Technically it runs on Proxmox with LXC containers, Ansible, OpenTofu, and NixOS, monitored with VictoriaMetrics, Grafana, and Loki, with PHP and Laravel for client work and MCP for AI integrations.
I own every client relationship end to end, from scoping and commercials through delivery and ongoing support, and advise on GDPR so that what I build stands up to scrutiny. On the hosting side that extends to contracts, suppliers, on-call, runbooks, and post-incident reviews, on ICO registered infrastructure hosted entirely in the UK. I have also guided clients through AI adoption, from automated workflows to branded in-app chatbots built on custom system prompting.
- I won 'Web Hosting Company of the Year 2024 - UK' from The Developer Awards.
- Bespoke Web & Mobile Apps
- PHP / Laravel
- Vue.js
- Security Consultancy
- Linux Server Administration
- Proxmox / LXC
- Ansible
- OpenTofu
- NixOS
- Grafana / Loki
- On-Call / Incident Response
- High Availability
Lincoln, UK
Probably Rational was the software agency I founded at university and grew to an award-winning 9-person team, building privacy focused mobile and web apps for clients across the UK and USA.
We built on PHP and Laravel with Flutter for mobile, running on Docker in AWS.
I ran the people side in full: hiring, onboarding, regular 1:1s, performance reviews, timesheets, payroll, and invoicing. Several of the part-time students I hired stayed on and moved into full-time engineering roles. I also managed the technology, client relationships, scoping, and commercial decisions, including taking several clients through Cyber Essentials certification on software we built for them.
- Won multiple industry awards for the company over consecutive years, recognising our technical excellence.
- Entrepreneurship
- Business Development
- Project Management
- Laravel
- Docker
- PHP
- MySQL
- Client Relations
- Team Leadership
The first million decimal digits of π, set out as a short mathematical paper rather than a wall of text, on a domain that is itself π to thirty-two places.
- Python
- mpmath
- Arbitrary-Precision Arithmetic
- Chudnovsky Algorithm
- Typography
- Static Site
A Terraform provider for SMTP2GO, so sending domains, SMTP users, API keys and webhooks are declared in code rather than clicked together in a dashboard. In development and not yet published.
- Terraform
- Provider Development
- Go
- IaC
- SMTP2GO
- Email Infrastructure
An off-the-shelf weather station turned into a time-series archive: readings pulled into VictoriaMetrics every five minutes and read through two Grafana dashboards that set my garden against my dad's station on the other side of the village, and against government river and air quality feeds.
- VictoriaMetrics
- Grafana
- Time-Series Data
- Monitoring
- Data Pipelines
- Self-Hosting
Secret Santa without the spreadsheet. Set up a gift exchange in under a minute, invite people by link or QR, draw the matches with one button, and let everyone message each other anonymously through to the day.
- PHP
- Laravel
- Matching Algorithms
- Custom Domains
- Email Delivery
A developer toolkit for short links, deep links and a growing set of small hosted tools, all sharing one tenancy model, custom-domain system and REST API. It is the platform the rest of my web tools are built on.
- PHP
- Laravel
- REST API
- Multi-Tenancy
- Custom Domains
- DNS & TLS Automation
Mirrors another Last.fm user's listening onto your own profile, live. Point it at a friend, a UK radio station or any Icecast stream and every track they play gets scrobbled to you for as long as you choose.
- Last.fm API
- OAuth
- Real-Time Synchronisation
- PHP
- Laravel
- Spotify API
A countdown to the next Student Finance England payment, laid out as a spiral-bound student planner with the term dates ticked off as they land.
- Web Development
- JavaScript
- Date Calculations
- Student Tools
A shared ball pit in the browser. Everyone online is a ball, one of them is it, and touching someone passes it on. A university game jam idea from 2015, rebuilt from scratch a decade later.
- Go
- WebSockets
- Real-Time Multiplayer
- Browser Game
- Pixel Art
- Game Jam
A daily paper that reduces the front pages of five British national newspapers to the three colours that covered most of them, with each day's splash headline read off the same scans.
- Image Processing
- k-means Clustering
- LAB Colour Space
- OCR
- JSON API
- RSS
Three Proxmox nodes across two locations, provisioned with OpenTofu and configured with Ansible and NixOS. It runs the things I use every day and doubles as the place I prove out infrastructure changes before they touch anything I run for other people.
- Proxmox
- LXC
- NixOS
- Ansible
- OpenTofu
- Docker
- Grafana
- Self-Hosting
- Home Assistant
- Raspberry Pi
I own the club website and the online merch store, contribute to decisions on branding, and help with social media. I also help run the club's events, marshalling across rally weekends and working the setup for all three annual rallies — putting up tents, building controls, and running bars — which I did as an ordinary member for a year before joining the committee.
I serve as a poll worker for all local and national elections, including council elections, general elections, and police commissioner elections. My responsibilities include verifying voter identification, ensuring ballots are completed correctly and securely deposited, assisting members of the public with the voting process, and managing the setup and closing procedures of the polling station.
I serve on the Independent Remuneration Panel, which meets annually to review and recommend councillor allowances and special responsibility payments. I work collaboratively with fellow panel members to ensure fair remuneration that aligns with surrounding council peers and reflects the responsibilities of elected officials. This role involves analysing comparative data, deliberating on appropriate allowance levels, and producing formal recommendations to the council.
The society had folded before I arrived, so I re-founded it and ran it for two years. It grew to over 60 members with around 300 on the online chat, on a programme of weekly events — hackathons and hands-on technical workshops. I handed over a committee structure that kept it running after I left.
Part-time
Taken alongside full-time work, to formalise the networking and distributed-systems knowledge I had picked up in practice. Includes Azure certification prep: AZ-900, AZ-104, DP-900 and AI-900.
- Cloud Computing & Administration
- Cloud Data Platforms & Tools
- Frontiers of Computer Science Research
- Information Systems Security
- Networks & Cloud Systems
- Research Methods
- Research Project
- Software Engineering
- Web Service Design and Development
Upper Second Class
I specialised in Robotic Systems in my final year. My dissertation was on fault-tolerant communication protocols for autonomous robots in unreliable field environments, keeping systems working when connectivity drops and things go wrong.
- Network Fundamentals
- Operating Systems
- Computer Architectures
- Autonomous Mobile Robotics
- Cyber Security
- Parallel Programming
- Algorithms and Data Structures
- Team Software Engineering
J. Murray, R. Wetzel, Z. Claret-Scott
9th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies · Barcelona, Spain · pp. 3906-3911
Additional work alongside my degree, separate from my own dissertation. I helped plan the idea, but my main contribution was building the prototype that tested it: a mobile app where students signed up, entered their topics of interest and project ideas, and matched with staff Tinder-style. Allocation then ran as a single matching pass that took every student's and supervisor's preferences into account, replacing a manual process. I presented the paper on stage at the conference myself.
I have a passion for photography, particularly in capturing the beauty of nature and landscapes. I enjoy experimenting with different lighting conditions and techniques to create stunning images.
- Camera
- Lighting
- Photoshop
- Composition
- Editing
I'm into strategy and co-op board games. It's how I spend most evenings with friends and family.
- Strategy
- Cooperative
- Problem Solving
I build and detail model railway layouts. It's the one hobby where I get to do something physical with my hands instead of staring at a screen.
- Model Engineering
- Layout Design
- Electronics