CV
Summary
I'm a Lead Software Engineer for the Billing Team at Stora with over
10 years experience. Prior to working with Stora, I was a senior software engineer in the Front End Architecture
team at FreeAgent and before that I was Head of Development
at a digital agency called Primate.
I started my software engineering journey in 1998, studying for a degree in Computer and Management
Science but, after finishing with a 2:1 Honours Degree, I had an opportunity to work with an exciting
new medical device technology. I re-trained and ran my own clinic for 11 years and combined that with
research work on a hand held medical device for improving spinal biomechanics.
I sold the clinic in February 2015 but had been getting the bug for programming again leading up to
this. I knew this was the direction I wanted to take my career and enrolled in a bootcamp
specialising in Ruby and Ruby on Rails before finding freelance work and it's been upwards from there!
Career
Nov 2025 - Present
Lead Software Engineer for the Billing Team at Stora
Leading a team of 5 senior engineers focused on our Stripe integration. We deliver features that
help operators increase revenue and reduce the manual overhead of running their finances.
Nov 2021 - Nov 2025
Senior Software Engineer for Stora
Built a reporting data warehouse using
Tiger Data
(formerly TimescaleDB) with automated pipelines to sync data from the primary database.
Delivered revenue growth features including automated subscription price increase tooling and a
Leads & Deals CRM system with kanban-style workflow for operators.
Led multiple Stripe migration projects to stay current with their API and improve data
synchronisation. Drove architecture improvements to restructure the codebase as the business scaled.
Apr 2021 - Nov 2021
Senior Software Engineer for FreeAgent
Part of a small group of engineers setting up a new Front End Architecture team at FreeAgent. Our
initial responsibility was to gradually port legacy JavaScript to a single, modern build pipeline.
Our long term aim was to implement systems that improve the lives of the engineering teams working on
the FreeAgent front-end, making adding and maintaining features a breeze. These responsibilities ranged
from enabling teams to easily maintain npm package versions, keeping the build pipeline fast,
ease of using reusable code patterns and much, much more.
Apr 2019 - Mar 2021
Software Engineer for FreeAgent
Joined the Marketing Platform team which has responsibility for the FreeAgent
marketing site
as well as supporting multiple teams throughout the business.
During my time, I helped setup the PageSpeed Insights API in our Data Warehouse to track the
performance effects of changes in our code base. I added Perfume.js to the website which pushed Core
Web Vitals measurements to our GA account for better oversight of Real User Metrics.
I made significant improvements in deploy times and helped lead the project to move the static
website from our self hosted infrastructure over to Netlify. This infrastructure enabled engineers to
work closely with the Sales team to deliver personalised learning experiences for our accountancy
practices and significantly increase engagement.
Aug 2018
Head of Development for Primate
In addition to the development work from my previous roles within the company, I worked with the
Technical Director assisting other developers. On top of this, I started building internal projects to
expand the scope and budget of work we could take on. Sites with my involvement on
backend and server work:
Book Week Scotland,
Light Up A Memory,
Gordonstoun.
Jul 2016
Senior Developer for Primate
Nov 2015
Junior Developer for Primate
Oct 2015
Freelance Work for Primate
Worked with
Primate
using LocomotiveCMS for Rails and worked with their designer and developers to create new pages
built from design specs.
Aug 2015
Freelance Work for Katana Code
Worked with
Katana Code
on a Rails project for one of their clients. This involved creating a website to allow customers to
log in securely to gain access to their information, view future events and make bookings.
Jul 2015
Tealeaf Academy Front End Foundations Course
My final project was a Todo application using my own MVC framework and utility library:
Todo MVC
May 2015
Finished the course and built my first production Rails application to create a web application for
managing a babysitting circle, Time Off Tokens. We also built a simple Reddit clone as our first
Rails project and Netflix clone as the second project.
Dec 2014
Began work on this Ruby on Rails course. The initial part focused on learning Ruby and we built a
simple web application using Sinatra.
Education
Business Experience
-
Director of Move Freely Solutions: 2003 - 2015
Ran an Edinburgh based clinic that specialised in technology to improve spinal biomechanics. Other
services included full biomechanics assessment, Sports Therapy and Massage Therapy.
As well as clinical work, I undertook spinal biomechanics research with the University of Central
Lancashire.
Hobbies And Interests
- Mountain Biking
- Formula 1
- Skiing
- Music