CaspianOne Open Banking

Jun 2025 — Mar 2026

Principal Developer (Contract)

Brought in as Principal to define the technical strategy for a regulated Open Banking platform serving Canadian and EU banking clients. Driving the architectural evolution from launch-stage PoC to a scalable, multi-tenant platform—owning the technical roadmap, setting engineering standards, and acting as the bridge between product vision and infrastructure reality.

• ◦ Defined and drove the platform architecture roadmap: decomposed a monolithic PoC into a multi-tenant distributed system capable of onboarding new banking clients in days instead of months.
• ◦ Established myself as the technical authority on FAPI 2.0/PSD2 authentication, designing compliant identity flows that unlocked regulatory approval for both Canadian and EU banking markets.
• ◦ Reduced AWS Lambda cold starts by 40% through dependency optimization and provisioned concurrency, directly enabling the sub-second transaction SLAs required by banking partners.
• ◦ Implemented OpenTelemetry observability across 12 microservices, reducing mean-time-to-diagnosis by 60%—a capability that proved critical during production incident response with banking clients.
• ◦ Contributed SQL schema extensions and data migrations to the existing banking domain model, adding and evolving tables in a live regulated system with strict backward-compatibility requirements.
• ◦ Set engineering standards for the team: introduced code review culture, testing gates, and architectural decision records (ADRs) that reduced production incidents by 50%.

Climatise

Jul 2023 — Jul 2025

Principal Engineer (React, Lambda, Python)

Founding engineer for a Sustainability AI startup. Owned the entire engineering roadmap, building the product, cloud infrastructure, and backend services from zero to a paying-customer launch—with a team I hired and grew to 5 engineers.

• ◦ Built the core product from scratch: a platform that enables enterprises to automatically ingest, classify, and analyze carbon emissions data from unstructured sources (invoices, utility bills, supply chain docs) using Generative AI (Amazon Bedrock/Claude and SageMaker).
• ◦ Architected an event-driven document processing pipeline using SNS and SQS: document upload triggers async AI classification and extraction, with results propagated back to Aurora via chained Lambda consumers — fully decoupled and independently scalable.
• ◦ Initially architected on GCP (Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, Cloud SQL) before migrating to AWS to align with investor infrastructure preferences—gaining hands-on experience with both cloud estates.
• ◦ Achieved Amazon Well-Architected status on the first submission—a rare feat for a seed-stage startup—which directly accelerated enterprise sales conversations and due diligence processes.
• ◦ Hired, mentored, and led a team of 5 senior engineers: established architectural patterns, code review standards, and CI/CD practices that enabled the team to ship production features weekly.
• ◦ Owned the full Aurora PostgreSQL estate: designed schemas from scratch, wrote and reviewed all migrations, optimised slow queries, and managed live schema changes with zero downtime across dev/staging/prod.
• ◦ Designed the entire AWS cloud estate using a strict IaC-first Terraform workflow across Cognito, Aurora, Lambda, and DynamoDB—achieving zero configuration drift across dev/staging/prod environments.
• ◦ Owned technical strategy and stakeholder communication: presented architecture to investors, led technical due diligence, and collaborated with product on roadmap prioritization.

Tesco

Sep 2021 — Jun 2024

Senior Developer (React, Node)

Core member of the Identity & Account platform team, safeguarding the digital front door for 2M+ daily users. Focused on modernizing legacy authentication flows and improving system reliability at massive scale.

• ◦ Implemented WebAuthn (Passkeys) and modern MFA flows, reducing account compromise incidents by 60% and significantly improving login conversion rates.
• ◦ Orchestrated the migration of monolithic legacy systems to agile Kubernetes-based micro-apps, allowing for independent scaling and failure isolation.
• ◦ Established comprehensive E2E testing with Playwright, achieving 90%+ coverage and enabling daily deployments through automated regression suites.
• ◦ Transformed release process from weekly to daily deployments through pipeline optimization and feature flagging.
• ◦ Mentored 3 mid-level engineers into senior roles, driving technical strategy and knowledge-sharing through architecture clinics and pair programming.

Senior Javascript Developer (React, Node)

Part of the 'Banking as a Platform' team, building the ecosystem that enabled Chase Bank to launch in the UK. Built modular banking products that could be assembled rapidly.

• ◦ Delivered unified web and mobile experiences using React and React Native, ensuring feature parity and code sharing between platforms to reduce developer overhead.
• ◦ Integrated Apigee and OAuth for secure API management, ensuring our architecture met strict FCA regulatory requirements and internal banking security standards.
• ◦ Built complex, long-running account onboarding workflows using AWS Step Functions, streamlining the customer journey from days to minutes.
• ◦ Explored GCP-based infrastructure options for platform services, evaluating GKE for container orchestration and Cloud SQL for managed PostgreSQL — informing the team's cloud strategy decisions.
• ◦ Created reusable component library with Material UI and Storybook, adopted by 4 other product teams.

Architect & Lead Developer (Freelance)

Collaborated with senior Salesforce engineers to design and build a PoC Salesforce plugin for container tracking. Worked from requirements gathered through direct technical discussions, owning the architecture end-to-end and delivering a paid proof of concept.

• ◦ Built a React component that combined Salesforce order data with live shipping carrier data — querying the Salesforce REST API for order records and merging with carrier tracking responses to show real-time container location in a single view.
• ◦ Architected the OAuth-authenticated Salesforce integration, using the Connected App pattern to securely call the Salesforce REST API (`/sobjects/Order`) from the React frontend.
• ◦ Delivered a paid proof of concept within 3 months, working independently from architecture through to implementation.