2014-2018
Global Head Of Engineering
Orwell Group
I spent five transformative years building ipagoo, the 2016 challenger bank. Starting as Head of Mobile Payments Architecture, I led a complete technical overhaul, scaled from 10 to 60+ engineers across three countries, and built infrastructure that achieved direct integration with the Bank of England on three payment schemes while handling tens of thousands of transactions per second.
Highlights
- Dematerialized payments via NFC/QR codes in the pre-Apple Pay era
- Complete codebase rewrite to meet financial-grade standards
- Direct Bank of England integration on FasterPayments, CHAPS, and BACS
- Scaled from 10 to 60+ engineers across London, Madrid, and Poland
- Achieved three payment scheme certifications ahead of competitors
- Speaker on Open Banking, infrastructure automation, and streaming architecture
I was promoted to Global Head of Engineering, leading Orwell Group’s entire engineering organization across three countries as we tackled the most ambitious technical challenge in the company’s history: scaling ipagoo from handling thousands of customers to processing tens of thousands of transactions per second while maintaining the regulatory compliance financial institutions demand.
The Hyper-Scale Challenge
By 2017, ipagoo had proven its core technology and was gaining traction. But the market opportunity was massive, and the technical requirements shifted fundamentally. We couldn’t simply optimize the existing infrastructure. We needed to architect for a completely different scale while integrating directly with the UK’s most critical payment rails.
The objective was clear: achieve direct integration with the Bank of England across three essential payment schemes that power the entire British financial system. FasterPayments handles real-time fund transfers for individuals and businesses. CHAPS manages high-value settlement for critical transactions. BACS processes batch payments for regular recurring transfers like payroll and utilities. Each has distinct technical specifications, audit requirements, and throughput demands.
We accomplished something remarkable: certifications on all three payment schemes within a matter of months, beating better-funded competitors like Monzo, TransferWise (now Wise), and Revolut to market. This wasn’t just a technical achievement. It was validation that a distributed team executing with discipline could outmaneuver incumbents. The implementation required deep expertise in distributed streaming technologies, high-performance databases optimized for transaction throughput, intelligent read caching architectures, and zero-downtime deployment patterns.
Scaling the Organization to Match Technical Ambition
Executing at this scale required organizational growth to match our technical ambition. I took on the challenge of scaling from 10 engineers in London to 60+ engineers distributed across three countries, establishing development centres in Madrid and Poland alongside the headquarters.
The hard part wasn’t hiring. It was maintaining engineering discipline, architectural coherence, and cultural consistency across distributed time zones and nationalities. I spent significant time traveling between our centres, running engineering practices workshops, conducting architectural reviews, and fostering an environment where technical excellence and customer obsession remained non-negotiable regardless of geography.
I established several foundational practices:
Distributed Decision Making: Teams in each location owned their domains end-to-end while maintaining alignment through clear architectural boundaries and regular sync points. This prevented knowledge silos while avoiding the paralysis of requiring central approval for every decision.
Consistent Quality Standards: I ensured that code review standards, testing requirements, and production readiness criteria were identical across all three centres. A deployment from Madrid had to meet the same rigor as one from London.
Cross-centre Collaboration: Rather than siloing teams by geography, I created deliberate mixing. I paired engineers from different locations on critical projects, rotated architects to review designs across centres, and hosted quarterly all-hands workshops that brought the entire organization together.
Knowledge Capture: I emphasized documentation and knowledge sharing. Every architectural decision, every lesson learned from production incidents, every optimization technique was captured and shared across the organization.
The relationships I built with talented professionals across these centres became invaluable. Many would continue supporting my work long after leaving Orwell.
Engineering as a Competitive Advantage
During this period, I became an active voice in the broader fintech and engineering community. I spoke at major conferences about Open Banking architecture and the technical challenges of building compliant financial infrastructure. I presented on infrastructure automation using HashiCorp tools and the patterns we’d developed for rapid, reliable deployments. I shared insights on big data and streaming architecture for payment processing both in the UK and internationally.
This wasn’t self-promotion. It was evangelizing a philosophy: that modern engineering practices, rigorous architecture, and disciplined team organization could unlock financial innovation. The fintech industry was attracting immense capital and talent, but many teams were still operating with outdated engineering mindsets. I wanted to demonstrate that challenger banks didn’t have to compromise on engineering quality to move fast.
The Inflection Point
By November 2018, ipagoo had reached an inflection point I hadn’t seen in my nearly five years there. The investors were actively pouring capital into the business. We were acquiring real customers and processing real payment volume at scale. Most importantly, we had built a solid engineering organization with proper production support structures, quality assurance practices, and product management discipline in place.
The platform had achieved technical maturity. The organization had achieved structural maturity. The business had achieved market validation. All three (technology, people, and product) were aligned and firing on all cylinders.
It was the perfect moment to ask a different question: if Orwell’s regulatory, scale, and operational challenges were so compelling, what other enterprises were struggling with similar problems? My passion for open-source technologies and desire to understand whether those lessons applied more broadly drew me toward exploring the broader market.
The experience at Orwell gave me insights that became the foundation for everything I would build next. Building products under financial regulation, scaling distributed teams across borders, making architectural trade-offs under high-stakes conditions, understanding the gap between what technology can do and what businesses actually need. First at Cloudera, where I helped financial institutions solve data infrastructure challenges. Then at PortIT, where I built the platform I wish had existed when I started at Orwell.
