My contract with NHS England has come to an abrupt end sooner than expected following a narrowing of focus within the Digital Prevention Services Portfolio. The team I was leading — designing and building components of a National Screening Platform — has been stood down. The work: making legacy health data interoperable and event-driven, surfacing screening journeys in the mighty NHS App, and integrating with ageing systems that only whispered their secrets under moonlight. Standard stuff.

As a result, I’m now available for a new contract from Tuesday 17 June 2025.

What I Do

I’m a Technical Lead, Architect and Developer with nearly three decades of experience delivering backend-heavy, cloud-native, high-availability systems.

I specialise in:

  • Distributed architectures
  • Messaging and event-driven design
  • API integration (REST and otherwise)
  • Systems that survive contact with the real world

I’ve worked across public health, finance and regulation, acquisition-driven rebuilds, and platforms serving millions. I’ve led teams through:

  • Agile delivery in high-pressure environments
  • Architecture design and review
  • Production support and incident handling
  • Interviewing and capability-building
  • CI/CD workflows, pairing, mentoring, and the occasional polite argument about naming things

My current toolkit includes:

  • Azure (Function Apps, Service Bus, Cosmos DB, SQL Server)
  • AWS (Lambda, Step Functions, SQS, API Gateway, Dynamo DB)
  • Languages: C# 1-13, Java 8-21
  • Patterns: Messaging, pub/sub, retries, idempotency, automation, DevOps, microservice orchestration and choreography
  • Delivery: GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, Jenkins, TeamCity, Planning Poker if I must

What I’m Looking For

  • Contract roles
  • Remote-first (Yorkshire-based but flexible)
  • Teams who value quality, autonomy, and making things that last
  • Work that has consequence - whether public, regulatory, or commercial

I work best when:

  • Things are ambiguous but important
  • Systems are complicated, but someone needs to make them understandable
  • There’s a team that cares, and a goal that’s worth the effort
  • There’s still some room for humour, even on release days

What You Get

  • A seasoned hand who can design it, build it, lead it, and fix it
  • Someone who still writes code and cares about clean abstractions
  • Judgement earned the hard way - through years of legacy horror, cloud nuance, and projects that had both
  • A teammate who’ll mentor juniors, challenge architects, and never, ever, suggest Kubernetes unless it’s absolutely necessary

If you’ve got something worth building, debugging, modernising, or rescuing — I’m all ears. Let’s talk.