Building platforms, teams and companies

Context

HUB was a fintech with a product vision, a CTO, and almost nothing else technical: no platform, no engineering organisation, no security posture, no hiring pipeline. I joined in January 2021 as the first technical hire outside the CTO and the company's eighth employee.

The constraint

Everything was the constraint, and everything competed for the same small team's attention. The company needed a product for regulated financial-services clients, the platform to run it on, the engineers to build it, and the controls to make it trustworthy, all at once, with a startup's budget and clock.

The intervention

I built the technical foundations and the organisation in the same motion. On the platform side, the foundational architecture on Azure with fully automated environments built from ARM, Bicep and Terraform through Azure DevOps pipelines, plus the initial security and infosec posture with SOC monitoring. On the organisation side, the resource plans, hiring process and autonomous team structures, along with the tech radar, architecture principles and development standards that kept a fast-growing group coherent. As the company scaled I became Managing Director and Head of Cloud Engineering in May 2022, owning the strategic technology and cloud roadmap, partnering with product, compliance and executive leadership, standing up an Engineering Enablement Platform and centre-of-excellence model, leading SOC 2 Type I readiness, and introducing event-driven automation and infrastructure-as-code as default practice. Towards the end of my time there we were exploring Azure OpenAI and retrieval-augmented generation workflows for the product.

Outcomes

• The engineering organisation grew from one technologist to 60+ engineers across Ireland, the UK and India, inside a company that grew to roughly 70 people.
• Cloud running costs reduced by approximately 40 percent while live environments doubled.
• Environment provisioning time cut by approximately 80 percent.
• Led the SOC 2 Type I readiness programme that gave regulated clients the assurance evidence they needed.
• Client-facing MVPs designed with clients and subject-matter experts and delivered by the teams the process had hired.

Capability gained

The bridge from architect to technology executive. Organisational design, hiring, budgets, compliance, client relationships and board-level trade-offs stopped being adjacent concerns and became the job. Company building is system design with people in the loop.