Zachary Claret-Scott

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 behind an egress proxy, and Vagrant for local environments, and Claude Code and MCP servers are part of my daily toolkit.

My main focus is data import at scale: the pipelines that pull millions of data points a day into the analysis platform. Around that I built and look after the macOS estate and its egress proxy, set up the team's reproducible development environment, and led the migration of the legacy codebase from PHP 5.3 to 8.4. I also ran an internal security audit and penetration test and fixed what it found, including several GDPR gaps. Agentic coding is part of how I work day to day, and I build MCP servers for internal tools, tuned for token efficiency, plus automated AI passes for code review and data analysis.

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 Sentry for error tracking and Laravel and MySQL on the application side.

As the sole engineer across both platforms I owned the engineering function and reported into the leadership team. I introduced version control, CI/CD, automated provisioning, and standard backups to the business, ran backup servers across multiple clouds behind Cloudflare so no single provider outage could take the service down, and migrated TurfKeeper from unmanaged Azure VMs onto infrastructure as code in Google Cloud.

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 and FilamentPHP platform on PHP 8.1.

I was brought in to move development in-house, replacing a 7-person agency team with 3 internal engineers. I took ownership of the pipelines, deployment workflows, dev environments, and team tooling, took the platform from PHP 5.2 to 8.1, and ran the team day to day through standups, code review, and mentoring, with regular stakeholder meetings to carry business decisions back to the engineers.

Claret-Scott & Co is my own consultancy, building bespoke applications and the infrastructure behind them for UK businesses. It is also the company behind enhost, the award-winning UK web hosting business I have run since 2016.

The hosting stack is Proxmox with LXC containers, provisioned with Ansible, OpenTofu, and NixOS and monitored with VictoriaMetrics, Loki, and Grafana, with DNS, SSL/TLS, firewalls, and mail all managed in house.

I run the whole estate, holding 99.9% uptime on UK based, ICO registered, GDPR compliant infrastructure, and cover on-call, runbooks, post-incident reviews, and tested host and application level backups myself. I have run Docker Swarm and Kubernetes clusters but default to LXC and Docker where the overhead of Kubernetes is not justified. On the consultancy side I advise clients on security, networks, and GDPR, and build AI automated workflows and MCP integrations.

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.

Everything ran on Linux and Docker in AWS, with deployment pipelines, client hosting, and device management through MDM, Google Admin, and G Suite.

I managed all of the infrastructure, from provisioning and pipelines through to network architecture and security, and took several clients through Cyber Essentials certification on software we built for them. Privacy and GDPR were designed in from the start, and several of the graduates I hired began their careers there.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm into strategy and co-op board games. It's how I spend most evenings with friends and family.

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.