CTO at AIR and Day2 Health
I'm a fractional, founding and recovery CTO. Founders, investors and scaleups call me when the technology matters and the situation is messy.
When to call me
You need a founding CTO before a full-time hire makes sense: someone to set the direction, hire the first engineers, and stay close to the product. I've been a founder several times: Firefly, an early Dubai digital agency; Luminescent, run across Dubai and India; and AIR, a security risk platform with a global remote engineering team.
The team's busy and the roadmap keeps changing, but too little reaches customers. I find the blockers and get things shipping again.
Maybe an outsourced development project has gone quiet, or nobody can say when anything will land. I work out what's really going on, say it plainly, and turn it into a recovery plan you can hold people to.
I build pipelines where AI writes, reviews and documents, and a human signs off anything that touches money or health data.
Current work
A platform for security risk assessments: assets, threats, vulnerabilities and on-site surveys, with AI generating suggestions and reports from external threat intelligence.
A wellness companion for the day-to-day of Parkinson's: a mobile app, an admin platform, API and cloud infrastructure.
Experience
The founders had been let down by a failed outsourced build. I reverse engineered a full suite of requirements and architecture decisions, put the replacement Parkinson's platform live on serverless AWS, and stayed on as CTO.
The platform runs multiple event-driven services with provider fallback across OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. A 14-agent delivery fleet is built and committed in the repo.
Deliveratron takes work from plan to code to review to merge on its own, each ticket and code reviewed independently across a matrix of AI providers and models.
The programme had stalled when I arrived. I pulled together teams across Dubai, London and Stockholm to build one experience across web and mobile, in React and React Native.
At Scottish Widows I moved pension contribution processing onto cloud-native microservices and a 28-day back-office process came down to seconds. I also took the group's Open Banking Lab, around 175 engineers, through a cloud migration to GCP.
Formed and led ten people who layered composable microservices over a legacy CMS. Content changes that had taken weeks started going out in seconds.
How I work
I can read the code, and I do. But I'm also looking at the team, the roadmap and the promises already made, because problems are rarely where people first point.
Fragile systems and unclear ownership slow everyone down. Speed comes back once they're fixed.
AI takes real drag out of delivery. Judgement on money, health data and compliance stays with humans, behind gates built into the pipeline itself.
Good fit
Founders, investors, scaleups and small consultancies: people who want a straight answer quickly and are ready to act once the plan is clear. I'm based between the UK and the Gulf, where I lived for eight years, and I work globally.
Not a fit
Slow, committee-led corporate programmes. I spent years in that world and know it well, but I'm more useful with small senior teams that want pace and someone willing to get into the details.
Contact
Book a call if you're starting something new, digging a project out of trouble, or you want a fractional CTO before a full-time hire makes sense.