Infrastructure, security and AI across four verticals

Overview

A consumer travel product, a benefits platform underneath it, and a research pod alongside it. Three quite different engineering problems sharing one team, one cloud account and one security posture. The engineering partner leads across all of them.

The business context

A consumer app wants to ship weekly. A benefits platform handling entitlements and partner integrations wants to be dependable and auditable. A beta pod exploring new products wants to throw work away without ceremony. Those three tempos pull in opposite directions, and the usual failure mode is that one wins: either the platform gets destabilised by consumer velocity, or the whole organisation slows to platform pace.

Holding all three at once is an architecture problem before it is a management problem. It needs boundaries clear enough that a beta experiment cannot reach production data, and a security and infrastructure baseline that applies everywhere without being renegotiated per team.

How it is structured

Infrastructure and security as a shared floor.

Scalable architecture, cloud infrastructure, reliability and engineering practice defined once and applied across every vertical, so each team inherits the baseline instead of negotiating it.

The benefits platform is a product, not plumbing.

The technology powering benefits has its own roadmap and its own reliability expectations, rather than existing as an appendix to the consumer app.

Data and AI sit on the same foundation.

Data engineering, analytics and AI capability built on the shared platform, including LLM backed workflows and intelligent product features, rather than as a separate stack with its own conventions.

A beta pod with permission to throw work away.

Experimentation and rapid prototyping run as an explicit function, taking new initiatives from concept to production when they earn it and discarding them cleanly when they do not.

The work

• Overall infrastructure, security posture and system architecture across the organisation.
• End to end encrypted real time chat and file sharing systems.
• AI and LLM powered workflows, and the data platform beneath them.
• Secure dashboards and record management, with enterprise grade authentication.
• Engineering leadership across four verticals, and the hiring to staff them.