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.