Profile
I am an applied AI engineer and product-focused platform architect specialising in production LLM systems for regulated environments. I have 15+ years' experience taking products from concept to production scale across startups, scale-ups and global commerce leaders.
I work across customer discovery, architecture, agentic implementation workflows, evaluation loops and retrieval systems, and deployment patterns. I help product, design and engineering teams turn ambiguous AI opportunities into reliable shipped products.
Selected impact
- Founding CTO at Wizen AI, an agentic AI platform used by Australian government and regulated healthcare, utilities and education organisations, processing millions of queries annually with strict source-grounding and compliance guardrails.
- Led engineering for Clara, a Webby-nominated AI health companion adopted by clinicians and patients across Australia.
- Fractional CTO and advisor at Rebuilt, building the platform foundations for Australia's first self-service product carbon reporting platform.
- Founded Sound Shelter, a vinyl marketplace scaled to 100k users and more than 30 record stores.
- First APAC technical hire at HomeAway before its acquisition by Expedia.
- Founding engineer at Precept, a Google-funded misinformation detection platform.
Experience
Lead AI Engineer - Pollen / Pollen Ventures
January 2022 to present | Sydney, Australia
Pollen is a venture and product studio. I lead the architecture and delivery of enterprise-grade generative AI platforms for regulated Australian organisations across government, healthcare and utilities, combining technical discovery, advisory, architecture reviews, prototypes and implementation planning.
- Led technical discovery, architecture recommendations, prototypes and implementation planning with external clients across government, healthcare, utilities and education.
- Built and mentored a high-performing engineering team delivering multi-million-dollar projects, while shaping technical and AI direction with product and design.
- Established AI-first engineering practices and evaluation standards to improve delivery speed and code quality.
- Established scalable infrastructure with infrastructure as code across AWS, Google Cloud, Vercel, EAS and Pulumi, while improving automated testing, CI/CD and developer experience.
Stack: TypeScript, Python, React, Next.js, Node.js, Django, Prisma, Postgres, Tailwind CSS, React Native, Expo, AWS, Google Cloud, Pulumi, RAG, LlamaIndex, Langfuse, OpenAI and Anthropic.
Selected AI systems
Wizen AI - Founding CTO
I am founding CTO of Wizen AI, an agentic AI platform used by Australian government, regulated healthcare, utilities and education organisations, processing millions of queries with strict source-grounding and compliance guardrails.
- Designed and shipped production agentic RAG systems using hybrid retrieval, query routing, source-grounded generation, compliance guardrails and abstention behaviours.
- Built evaluation and observability loops across retrieval quality, answer quality, grounding, safety and regression risk, using curated evaluation sets, production traces and failure analysis.
- Led customer discovery and technical feasibility work to identify high-value AI use cases, validate integration constraints, expose failure modes and decide whether to prototype, ship, defer or de-scope.
- Established secure multi-tenant SaaS foundations on Google Cloud, including RBAC, tenant isolation, auditability, deployment patterns and production support practices.
Clara - Healthcare AI companion
I architected and built Clara, an AI health companion for Australians living with arthritis.
- Designed a secure, privacy-aware RAG architecture delivering evidence-based responses within a Webby-nominated mobile app.
- Achieved 87% specialist approval and 90% recommendation rates.
- Featured in 9News, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
Rebuilt - Fractional CTO and advisor
I defined the platform architecture, built early proofs of concept, hired the engineering team and established delivery practices for scalable, auditable carbon reporting workflows. I advised on technical strategy, architecture decisions and implementation planning.
Technical capabilities
- Languages: JavaScript, TypeScript, Python and SQL.
- AI and machine learning: Agentic RAG architectures, hybrid full-text and vector retrieval, LLM orchestration, multi-step agents, prompt design, evaluation loops, Langfuse, LlamaIndex, OpenAI, Anthropic and vector search.
- Front-end: React, Next.js, React Native, Expo and Tailwind CSS.
- Back-end: Node.js, Express, Django, FastAPI, GraphQL, Prisma, Postgres and MySQL.
- Infrastructure: AWS, Google Cloud, Vercel, CI/CD, Docker and Git.
- Testing and analytics: Playwright, Jest, Vitest, React Testing Library, GA4 and Mixpanel.
Open-source work
I maintain Fetch Engines, an open-source toolkit for reliable web-content extraction into Markdown and structured data. I have also written about the design decisions behind Fetch Engines.
Earlier experience
Founder / Engineer - Sound Shelter
April 2013 to January 2024 | Sydney, Australia
- Designed and built a platform, including an iOS app, that delivers personalised music recommendations and matches buyers to record stores selling the music they want.
- Onboarded more than 30 partner record stores and grew the user base to around 100k users per year.
- Built infrastructure that pulls information from partner websites via APIs, feeds and web crawling, alongside end-to-end marketing automation.
Stack: React, Next.js, Node.js, Prisma, MySQL, Tailwind CSS, React Native and AWS.
Senior Software Engineer - Endeavour
January 2020 to January 2022 | Sydney, Australia
I worked in the marketing team, building content and event platforms that contributed to lead targets being exceeded by 17%.
- Managed the build of a student onboarding platform used by thousands of students each term.
- Built a practice booking system processing hundreds of instant payment bookings per week.
Stack: React, Django, Postgres, Tailwind CSS and AWS.
Senior Software Engineer - Precept / YouCheck
August 2018 to August 2019 | Barcelona, Spain
YouCheck received Google Digital News Initiative funding to improve online information environments.
- Built a Python and Django backend system, APIs and infrastructure for a machine-learning application identifying misinformation in images and text.
Stack: React, Next.js, Node.js, Python, Django and Google Cloud.
Integration Engineer - Partnerize
December 2016 to April 2018 | Sydney, Australia
I was APAC technical lead for enterprise client integrations into Partnerize's partner marketing and attribution platform. Clients included Apple, Expedia, Tripadvisor, Vodafone, Nike, Google and Emirates.
- Designed and built custom integrations with third-party platforms, APIs and data feeds, transforming client data into Partnerize's platform schema.
- Supported pre-sales and post-sales technical consulting for enterprise deals and renewals worth several million dollars.
Travel
August 2016 to December 2016
Sales Engineer, HomeAway.com / Vrbo - Expedia Inc.
July 2012 to August 2016 | Melbourne and Sydney, Australia
I was the first APAC technical hire for HomeAway.com, designing integration solutions that enabled partners to connect inventory to the marketplace.
- Led pre-sales and post-sales technical consulting across APAC, partnering with sales, product, operations and engineering teams to scope, design and deliver partner integrations.
- Built custom feed-parsing infrastructure that powered approximately 20,000 property listings on HomeAway.com, and worked with global engineering teams to standardise integrations and migrate legacy data feeds.
Education
BSc (Hons) Internet Computing
Northumbria University, UK
Working rights
Australian citizen.