Summary

Phil is an experienced technical architect; happiest when being the conduit between technologists, team leads, product owners, fellow architects, customers and leadership teams to guide effective technical evolution for a business. Phil equally enjoys discovering new ideas and spaces, generating prototypes, co-innovating with others¹, reading manuals², delivering service evolution and continuous learning. Phil always likes to work his way out of a role by spreading knowledge into teams. Phil believes trust matters and information silos are bad.

¹ Not a fan of the word ‘brainstorming’
² Has been known to read the GDPR!

Skill highlights

• Architecture (C4 models, TOGAF, SDLCs & enterprise architectures, Cloud native engineering)
• Communication (within and around delivery teams)
• Reverse Engineering / Software archeology, for architecture discovery, security evaluation, occasionally source recovery!
• Forward Engineering, preferably in C#, Java, Python or C, but not a technology fundamentalist :)
• Operational Engineering, with cloud tooling (eg: ARM), operational visibility (eg: Datadog)
• Security Engineering / Information assurance including risk management and technical security (ISO27001 & PCI-DSS compliance, security awareness training, previously a Certified Ethical Hacker)
• Information technologies, particularly: Windows Server, Linux, containers & VMs, config management
• Research and learning, especially in new & cross-boundary areas

Experience

• 2013-2020: Technical architect for GB Group, keeping the company technology evolving successfully as it grew from ~300 people in the UK to ~1100 people in 40 global locations via product expansion and aquisitions (I consulted into M&A team). I chaired the Design Authority Board as a core forum of information exchange, and decision authorisation across the business. I led the evolution of company platforms from isolated monoliths to interconnected services, allowing flexible service creation for target markets. I contributed to the migration of a service from un-scalable hardware encryption to Azure KeyVault. I discovered and documented historical systems on aquisition / retirement of owners.
• 2007-2013: Security analyst for BT, where I was part of a small hand-picked group of technology experts providing investigation, risk assessment and mitigation development for BT and NCSC/GCHQ to manage the (critical) national infrastucture risks of purchasing and deploying far-eastern telco equipment into the core BT network. I have been unable to mention this until Feb 2019, when the ex-technical director of NCSC published this blog (the paragraph below the final list of bullet points refers to us).
• 2000-2007: Consultant with IDL, providing various services to other organisations, ranging from product design and development (eg: mobile games, high availability routers) to customer communications (eg: BTexact website management and CMS).
• 1996-2000: Technical lead for BT Wireplay, where I led the development team creating the UK’s first (inter-)national computer gaming platform, provided the early architectural designs and enjoyed my only ‘Internet era startup’, from which I resigned after 12 months (it was already dead!)
• 1989-1996: Developer in BT, where I worked on both design and software development for automated speech services (eg: Callminder/1571), speech recognition technology (using neural networks) and gained valuble experience in operational services as Callminder went to production.