I have spent twenty years building software, moving steadily deeper into the stack. Full-stack web to begin with, and for the last decade the backend and platform layer: the auth flows, identity primitives, and APIs that have to keep working when everything around them changes.
Today I am Tech Lead for the Connections team at Zapier, where I own the authentication layer that connects millions of end users to more than eight thousand third-party apps. It is identity and authorization infrastructure at scale: OAuth grants, token lifecycle, and credential storage across thousands of integrations. Most of my time goes to architecture. Where logic lives, how domains decouple, and how to evolve a monolith module without breaking the platform underneath it.
Right now I am leading the structural separation of the authentication and connections platform out of the monolith, replacing schema-level coupling with lifecycle events across two adjacent platform teams. Alongside the systems work I build AI-assisted tooling the team uses daily, and I think a lot about how to make agentic workflows repeatable rather than improvised. Some of that thinking is in Writing.
What I care about: durable systems, honest engineering, and lifting the people around me.
Selected experience
Zapier · Tech Lead and senior platform engineer · 2019 to present
Owned the auth and integration edge that Zapier's product runs on. Led the outbound API proxy to Tier 1 status, designed a JWT-based metered billing and rate-limiting system that opened a new revenue line, and built end-to-end request lineage across platform services. Now driving the v2 public API and the auth platform's separation from the monolith.
Fully Baked Ltd · Director · 2016 to 2019
Ran a web development and infrastructure consultancy, delivering CRMs, marketplaces, and content platforms in Ruby on Rails and PHP.
Dribbble · Software Engineer · 2017 to 2019
Integrated third-party recruitment tools into the platform and maintained the hiring product surface for the designer community.
Earlier · Crew Labs, freelance, Data Harvesting, and roles going back to 1999, spanning CRM platforms, e-marketing systems, and application infrastructure.
Community
Co-founded PHP Dorset and PHP South Coast, a regional user group and a conference for first-time speakers, and spent several years speaking at developer events. More recently I volunteered with The Collab Lab, mentoring early-career developers and automating the programme's cohort setup.