The people in the pitch are the people on the engagement

Founded Cymbiote in 2016 after a decade building payments infrastructure. Still reviews every architecture decision record on engagements over $1M, which the team alternately values and dreads.

• Distributed systems
• Payments
• Organisational design

Sixteen years across trading systems and grid infrastructure. Wrote the internal standard that says no service ships without an owner, an SLO and a runbook.

• Event-driven architecture
• SRE
• Platform engineering

Believes prototypes belong in a browser, not a design tool. Built the accessibility practice after a public-sector audit went badly in 2019 and made sure it never did again.

• Design systems
• Accessibility
• Research

Came from clinical informatics and brought its evidence standards with her. Insists on a scorecard before a feature, which has cost us two pitches and saved four projects.

• Evaluation
• Retrieval systems
• Clinical AI

Runs the Lahore hub and the apprenticeship programme that has taken 34 junior engineers to senior in four years. Reviews more pull requests than anyone at the company.

• Mentorship
• Backend systems
• Delivery

Spent seven years on the offensive side before switching. Threat-models every engagement in week one and has an unnerving instinct for where the authorisation bug is.

• Threat modelling
• Penetration testing
• Compliance

Has migrated thirty-three estates and will tell you, at length, why thirty-one of them did not need Kubernetes. Owns the FinOps practice.

• Cloud architecture
• FinOps
• Migration

The reason engagements land on the date agreed at kickoff. Introduced the practice of publishing a written risk register to clients weekly, unedited.

• Programme delivery
• Risk management
• Client partnership

Rebuilt the Kestrel banking app and deleted its generic error screen personally. Maintains the internal lint rule that stops anyone adding it back.

• React Native
• Offline-first
• Mobile performance

Built the reconciliation harness that made the Axiom Pay migration defensible. Treats data quality as a production concern with its own SLOs.

• Streaming data
• Reconciliation
• Data quality

Owns the internal developer platform. Measures his work by how rarely anyone has to think about it, which makes his performance reviews unusual.

• Developer experience
• CI/CD
• Observability

Ran the review-mining study behind the Kestrel rebuild. Argues, persuasively, that most product problems are research problems wearing a design costume.

• User research
• Interaction design
• Service design