CTO · Software architecture · Production AI
Engineering leadership, production AI and the changing structure of the firm
RSS FeedI'm a CTO, software architect and engineering leader working on production AI systems, agentic software and modern engineering organisations. I also advise organisations on AI architecture, engineering transformation and the practical governance of autonomous systems.
I currently work as a CTO while selectively advising organisations on complex AI, software architecture and engineering transformation problems.
Agentic AI · Engineering Transformation · Platform Architecture · AI Governance · CTO Advisory
Current work
My work sits at the intersection of engineering leadership, architecture, AI systems and organisational design. The common thread is practical delivery: systems that can be operated, governed, observed and changed by real teams.
Consulting and advisory
Selective work with founders, CTOs, engineering leaders and organisations tackling complex AI and software problems.
- AI and agent architecture
- Engineering transformation
- Technical strategy
- AI governance and assurance
- Fractional CTO advisory
- Defined SOW delivery
Research programme
The Protocol Firm
Research and writing on how AI, autonomous agents and changing coordination costs may reshape companies, professional services and knowledge work.
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The Protocol Firm
Published: at 05:00 PMAI makes more intelligence available to the firm, allowing execution capacity to grow without a proportional increase in human effort at the point of execution. The Protocol Firm asks how delegated authority remains governable, testable and open to correction.
Selected case studies
Evidence of the kind of systems, teams and operating problems this work is grounded in.
- Agentic recruitment platform
- AI-assisted engineering harness
- Enterprise recruitment platform
Featured writing
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Inside the Bellman loop: how value actually propagates
Published: at 07:00 PMBellman equations are usually introduced recursively, and the recursion misleads programmers. The runtime is closer to iterative graph relaxation — value sweeping backward through a state graph until it stops moving.
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The Firm in 2026
Published: at 10:00 AMReturning to Coase's original question — why do firms exist? — with fifteen posts of new machinery. The answer has not changed. The composition of the costs has.
Recent Posts
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How celld Gets Rid of the Control Plane
Published: at 11:00 AMcelld runs a fleet with no membership protocol, no failure detector, and no consensus service. The bucket is doing that job too — which means the same bucket credentials that grant durability also grant total control of the fleet.
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How celld Actually Achieves RPO Zero
Published: at 11:00 AMcelld claims a recovery point objective of zero against single-node failure — no acknowledged write is lost as long as the node holding it doesn't disappear before the bucket catches up. The mechanism isn't 'wait for S3 on every write.' It's closer to synchronous peer replication, with the bucket as backstop. Here's the actual write path, in full.
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How celld Turns Object Storage Into a Coordination Service
Published: at 11:00 AMcelld requires only four things from an object store — conditional create, conditional overwrite, read-after-write consistency, ranged reads — and builds cell ownership, epoch fencing, and self-fencing leases on top. Here's exactly how, and what it costs.
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celld: Durable Objects, Unbundled
Published: at 11:00 AMcelld, a new open-source project from Deno, reimplements Cloudflare's Durable Objects model on infrastructure you own — and it's a good lens for asking what should actually own an AI agent's state.