AVAILABLE · UK · EU HOURS

Tech Lead
shipping into real constraints.

30 years of production software engineering, the last 15 inside teams navigating architectural inflection points where the platform had to keep running while it was being replaced. Since late 2024 — in parallel with platform work at First Databank, then full-time after — I've been building agentic systems hands-on, including two AI coding agent runtimes from scratch in Python and Go.

CurrentlyApplied AI · Founder Engagements

Most recentFirst Databank · 2020–2025

LocationBath, UK

Stack todayPython · Go · Elixir · C#

01 / Selected work

The interesting parts.

Roles where the work mattered, the constraints were real, and the choices stuck. Click any card to drill in. Click a tag to filter across the timeline — the matching skill query opens in the Workbench below.

Nov 2024 — Present

Applied AI — Agentic Systems Personal Builds & Advisory

Two AI coding agent runtimes from scratch, plus shipped products with real users.

chapgent (Python) — TUI-based coding agent. 26 built-in tools (filesystem, git, search, shell, testing, web, scaffolding), multi-provider LLM support via LiteLLM (16 providers), session management with persistence, parallel tool execution, LRU result caching with TTL, permission system with risk classification, project context detection.
claudego (Go, Bubble Tea TUI) — streaming Anthropic client with goroutine-based agent loop, channel-mediated permission requests, context cancellation propagation through the tool layer. Same problem in two languages with different concurrency models, deliberately, to think through runtime trade-offs first-hand.
org-brain (TypeScript / Node) — a lifecycle-governed knowledge base for engineers and AI agents. Hybrid retrieval over Postgres + pgvector combines dense semantic search, curated trigger/tag matching, and a deterministic exact-identifier path (tsvector simple config, per-token OR, count-boosted) so symbols, flags and slugs named in prose always surface. Cards move draft → promote → revise → supersede behind human gates; deployed to production as an MCP (Streamable HTTP) server with a Claude Code plugin and a SessionStart context-injection hook.
Hexis Golf — AI-driven feel-based golf practice planning. Live with trial users, PGA professional contacts engaged.
Slackex — Slack-style team chat in Elixir / Phoenix on my own infrastructure. Working artefact and stress-test of agentic workflows on a non-trivial codebase.
grocery_planner & kuma_san_kanji — Phoenix / Elixir builds: grocery_planner pairs the Ash framework with a Python OCR service for receipt processing (JSON:API across inventory, recipes, meal planning, shopping, notifications, analytics); kuma_san_kanji is the kanji-learning app that started this journey.
Self-hosted delivery platform — GitHub Actions builds immutable, SHA-tagged images to GHCR; ephemeral runners join the tailnet and deploy over it by Docker Compose, with the repo as the single source of truth for each stack. Toolchain versions are pinned once in .tool-versions and read by local, CI and Docker alike; deploy secrets are split platform-owned from app-repo workflow code, so a pipeline stays green build-only and self-arms when the final secret lands. Shared Prometheus / Grafana / Tempo / OTLP observability is multi-tenanted across apps over an isolated Docker network.
Homelab: Proxmox cluster running Debian LXC, Docker, Caddy reverse proxy, Cloudflare DNS, Tailscale, Pi-hole. Claude Code as primary development environment throughout.

PythonGoTypeScriptElixirPhoenixLLMsAgentsMCPTUIBubble TeaLiteLLMAnthropicClaude CodePostgrespgvectorHomelabProxmoxDockerTailscaleGitHub ActionsOpenTelemetry

2020 — 2025

Building Pharaoh First Databank

Replaced a Silverlight + .NET platform in flight, without freezing delivery, in a clinical-safety regulated environment.

Sphinx was a Silverlight-fronted .NET middleware platform with regulatory and clinical-safety obligations and a lot of tribal knowledge concentrated in a few long-tenured heads. Silverlight was reaching end-of-support — the platform had to move regardless.
We took the move as acceleration, not a freeze: Pharaoh was the replacement we built alongside Sphinx, prioritised by features most valuable to the business, with continuous delivery throughout.
Event-driven messaging in place of point-to-point calls; React SPAs alongside the Silverlight UI until decommissioning; mature monitoring and alerting from day one; trunk-based delivery with BDD/TDD; pair and ensemble programming as default; feature toggles end to end.
Response times, infrastructure footprint and platform stability all materially improved on the Pharaoh side. Production alerts and time-to-fix dropped through better observability and event-driven boundaries.
Held strong views and argued for them — the ones that landed did so because the team genuinely owned them by the time they went live.

C#.NETReactSPAEvent-DrivenAzureDDDTrunk-Based DevBDDTDDFeature TogglesHealthcareRegulated

2020 — 2025

AnalyseRx Rules Engine First Databank

2M+ patient records processed daily through an extended rules engine, against the reliability bar healthcare imposes.

Argued for and shaped the PaaS cloud architecture along DDD lines with explicit bounded contexts.
The team released major product extensions: new rule types, patient trend monitoring.
Established the CI/CD pipeline (GitHub Actions, TeamCity, Octopus) that let us release confidently into a regulated environment.

C#.NETRules EngineAzurePaaSDDDBounded ContextsGitHub ActionsTeamCityOctopusHealthcare

2020 — 2025

Population Analytics Platform First Databank

Greenfield clinical-analytics platform for NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups.

React + Azure Functions + Service Bus + CosmosDB.
Multi-CCG deployment model — each commissioning group as a logical tenant on shared infrastructure.
Pushed for BDD/TDD instilled from day one; team delivered clinical-intervention analytics into Power BI and Tableau with that discipline carried through the lifecycle.

ReactAzure FunctionsService BusCosmosDBBDDTDDPower BITableauMulti-tenant

2016 — 2020

Grocery Market Share Modernisation Kantar Worldpanel

Legacy C / Oracle / COBOL stack carrying a 5-year rolling dataset across 40,000+ panelists, modernised to Azure serverless.

SQL Data Warehouse optimisation — ~60% query time reduction.
Azure Data Factory pipelines for the Oracle-to-Azure migration.
Reverse-engineering proprietary file formats to preserve data continuity.
Business-rule engine API in C# wrapping InRule for mobile shopping data.
Azure Functions + Logic Apps orchestrating the data plane.
Python packages on Databricks for Event Hubs processing.
Per-PR environment provisioning in Azure DevOps.
The work was the team's; the practices that made it stick (Azure, .NET, SOLID, TDD) came in part from sustained mentorship and the introduction of better engineering norms.

COracleCOBOLAzureServerlessAzure FunctionsLogic AppsData FactoryDatabricksEvent HubsSQL DW.NETSOLIDTDD

Oct 2012 — Mar 2015

Software Developer / Tech Lead BBC Future Media

Led migration of user-generated-content services from physical hardware to Azure IaaS.

PowerShell-driven IaC for VM provisioning.
ASP.NET MVC 4 Web API replacement for core social-media services.
WCF REST services for comments, reviews, moderation across BBC platforms.
Internationalisation for World Service multi-language commenting.
Introduced BDD with SpecFlow across the team; integrated CI with Java and PHP platforms across BBC ecosystem.
Stepped back from engineering management deliberately — preferring to manage process and delivery over career goals.

Azure IaaSPowerShellIaCASP.NET MVC 4 Web APIWCFSpecFlowBDDi18n

Jan 2012 — Jul 2012

Engineering Manager (contract) BBC Future Media

First contractor Engineering Manager in Audience Facing Services. 17-person multi-language team.

Cut in-flight project count by 50% to make delivery predictable.
Established Agile health checks and Definition of Ready/Done across the group.
Delivered a live-blogging product on top of the existing stack.

LeadershipAgile.NETJavaPHPRuby

Mar 2011 — Dec 2011

Development Manager / Test Manager ITV Technology

Ran the VOD content pipeline (excluding transcoding) feeding ITV.com and ITV Player.

Absorbed Test Manager responsibility when the role went vacant rather than wait for a backfill — 10-person agile team across delivery and quality.
"Always releasable" trunk-based delivery; SOLID/TDD/CI as house style.
Established developer career paths; ran a 100+ person hack day across 12 teams.

LeadershipVODTrunk-Based DeliverySOLIDTDDCI

Sep 2004 — Mar 2011

Senior Software Developer / Tech Lead BBC Future Media

Technical lead for user-generated-content services across the BBC — at BBC scale.

WCF REST services in multiple formats (XML, JSON, RSS, Atom), integrated with iPlayer and clients across JavaScript, Flash, Java and PHP.
Line-managed an 8-person team with focus on TDD, continuous integration, code quality.
Established Scrum processes; led release planning across multiple stakeholder teams.

WCFRESTXMLJSONRSSAtomJavaScriptFlashJavaPHPScrumTDDCI

Nov 2024 — Present

Applied AI — Agentic SystemsPersonal Builds & Advisory

Two AI coding agent runtimes from scratch, plus shipped products with real users.

chapgent (Python) — TUI-based coding agent. 26 built-in tools (filesystem, git, search, shell, testing, web, scaffolding), multi-provider LLM support via LiteLLM (16 providers), session management with persistence, parallel tool execution, LRU result caching with TTL, permission system with risk classification, project context detection.
claudego (Go, Bubble Tea TUI) — streaming Anthropic client with goroutine-based agent loop, channel-mediated permission requests, context cancellation propagation through the tool layer. Same problem in two languages with different concurrency models, deliberately, to think through runtime trade-offs first-hand.
org-brain (TypeScript / Node) — a lifecycle-governed knowledge base for engineers and AI agents. Hybrid retrieval over Postgres + pgvector combines dense semantic search, curated trigger/tag matching, and a deterministic exact-identifier path (tsvector simple config, per-token OR, count-boosted) so symbols, flags and slugs named in prose always surface. Cards move draft → promote → revise → supersede behind human gates; deployed to production as an MCP (Streamable HTTP) server with a Claude Code plugin and a SessionStart context-injection hook.
Hexis Golf — AI-driven feel-based golf practice planning. Live with trial users, PGA professional contacts engaged.
Slackex — Slack-style team chat in Elixir / Phoenix on my own infrastructure. Working artefact and stress-test of agentic workflows on a non-trivial codebase.
grocery_planner & kuma_san_kanji — Phoenix / Elixir builds: grocery_planner pairs the Ash framework with a Python OCR service for receipt processing (JSON:API across inventory, recipes, meal planning, shopping, notifications, analytics); kuma_san_kanji is the kanji-learning app that started this journey.
Self-hosted delivery platform — GitHub Actions builds immutable, SHA-tagged images to GHCR; ephemeral runners join the tailnet and deploy over it by Docker Compose, with the repo as the single source of truth for each stack. Toolchain versions are pinned once in .tool-versions and read by local, CI and Docker alike; deploy secrets are split platform-owned from app-repo workflow code, so a pipeline stays green build-only and self-arms when the final secret lands. Shared Prometheus / Grafana / Tempo / OTLP observability is multi-tenanted across apps over an isolated Docker network.
Homelab: Proxmox cluster running Debian LXC, Docker, Caddy reverse proxy, Cloudflare DNS, Tailscale, Pi-hole. Claude Code as primary development environment throughout.

2020 — 2025

Building PharaohFirst Databank

Replaced a Silverlight + .NET platform in flight, without freezing delivery, in a clinical-safety regulated environment.

Sphinx was a Silverlight-fronted .NET middleware platform with regulatory and clinical-safety obligations and a lot of tribal knowledge concentrated in a few long-tenured heads. Silverlight was reaching end-of-support — the platform had to move regardless.
We took the move as acceleration, not a freeze: Pharaoh was the replacement we built alongside Sphinx, prioritised by features most valuable to the business, with continuous delivery throughout.
Event-driven messaging in place of point-to-point calls; React SPAs alongside the Silverlight UI until decommissioning; mature monitoring and alerting from day one; trunk-based delivery with BDD/TDD; pair and ensemble programming as default; feature toggles end to end.
Response times, infrastructure footprint and platform stability all materially improved on the Pharaoh side. Production alerts and time-to-fix dropped through better observability and event-driven boundaries.
Held strong views and argued for them — the ones that landed did so because the team genuinely owned them by the time they went live.

2020 — 2025

AnalyseRx Rules EngineFirst Databank

2M+ patient records processed daily through an extended rules engine, against the reliability bar healthcare imposes.

2020 — 2025

Population Analytics PlatformFirst Databank

Greenfield clinical-analytics platform for NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups.

2016 — 2020

Grocery Market Share ModernisationKantar Worldpanel

Legacy C / Oracle / COBOL stack carrying a 5-year rolling dataset across 40,000+ panelists, modernised to Azure serverless.

Oct 2012 — Mar 2015

Software Developer / Tech LeadBBC Future Media

Led migration of user-generated-content services from physical hardware to Azure IaaS.

Jan 2012 — Jul 2012

Engineering Manager (contract)BBC Future Media

First contractor Engineering Manager in Audience Facing Services. 17-person multi-language team.

Mar 2011 — Dec 2011

Development Manager / Test ManagerITV Technology

Ran the VOD content pipeline (excluding transcoding) feeding ITV.com and ITV Player.

Sep 2004 — Mar 2011

Senior Software Developer / Tech LeadBBC Future Media

Technical lead for user-generated-content services across the BBC — at BBC scale.

02 / Earlier career

The longer arc.

From 16-bit dev tools through aviation analytics, CRM modernisation, and survey software. Three decades of platforms.

2016 Reed Business / FlightGlobal Aviation analytics; C# / Web API / AngularJS / Amazon Redshift.

2015–2016 Neilson Financial Services CRM modernisation; ASP.NET MVC 5, Web API, SignalR, EF6. Introduced Octopus / TeamCity continuous delivery and Selenium browser automation.

1999–2004 SPSS Ltd C++ / COM components for multimedia survey software; ASP.NET CATI applications.

1997–1999 MCT Europe Modernised legacy Unix / AS400 advertising applications to Windows C++ / COM.

1995–1997 SN Systems PlayStation / Saturn dev tools, CD emulation, 16→32-bit migration of DOS tooling.

03 / Skills

What's in the kit.

Categorised, not ranked. Most listed here has shipped to production.

Cloud & Platform

Azure FunctionsAzure Event HubAzure Data FactoryAzure SQLService BusCosmosDBLogic AppsAPI ManagementKey VaultContainer ServicesDatabricksARMPowerShellAzure CLIGitHub ActionsAzure DevOpsTeamCityOctopus DeployTailscaleGHCRPrometheus / Grafana / Tempo

Agentic & Applied AI

Two AI coding agent runtimes from scratch (chapgent / Python, claudego / Go)Production discipline applied to agentic workflowsClaude Code as primary dev environmentLiteLLM multi-providerAnthropic streamingBubble Tea TUIMCP servers (Streamable HTTP)Hybrid retrieval (pgvector + full-text)OpenTelemetry / OTLPHomelab Gen AI infra (Proxmox, Docker, Caddy, Tailscale)

Languages & Frameworks

C# / .NET CoreTypeScript / JavaScriptPythonElixir / PhoenixGoReactAngularREST APIsMicroservicesDomain-Driven DesignWCFASP.NET MVC / Web APISQL ServerOracleAmazon RedshiftCosmosDBPostgres / pgvectorAsh FrameworkObanDrizzle

Leadership & Practices

Trunk-based developmentPair & ensemble programmingTDDBDDContinuous deliveryFeature togglesExpand/contractParallel changeObservability & alerting from day oneLean flowAgile / Scrum / KanbanTeam leadershipMentoringCoachingTechnical hiring

04 / Builds & products

What I'm making.

In parallel with platform work, then full-time from May 2025. Two agent runtimes from scratch, several products with real users.

chapgent AI

Python TUI coding agent — 26 built-in tools, multi-provider LLM via LiteLLM (16 providers), parallel tool execution, LRU cache, permission system with risk classification.

Python · TUI · LiteLLM

claudego AI

Go streaming Anthropic client with Bubble Tea TUI — goroutine-based agent loop, channel-mediated permissions, context cancellation through the tool layer.

Go · Bubble Tea · Anthropic SDK

org-brain AI

Lifecycle-governed knowledge base for engineers and AI agents. Hybrid retrieval over Postgres + pgvector: dense semantic, curated trigger/tag, and a deterministic exact-identifier path so symbols and slugs named in prose always surface. Draft → promote → revise → supersede lifecycle behind human gates; deployed as an MCP server with a Claude Code plugin.

TypeScript · Postgres/pgvector · MCP

Hexis Golf Live

AI-driven feel-based golf practice planning. Live with trial users and PGA professional contacts engaged.

golf.davewil.dev ↗

Slackex Live

Slack-style team chat in Elixir/Phoenix, deployed on my own infrastructure. Working artefact and stress-test of agentic workflows on a non-trivial codebase.

chat.davewil.dev ↗

grocery_planner WIP

Phoenix / Elixir + Ash framework with Python OCR service for receipt processing. JSON:API across inventory, recipes, meal planning, shopping, notifications, analytics.

Elixir · Phoenix · Ash

kuma_san_kanji WIP

Phoenix / Elixir kanji learning application — the originating project of this whole journey.

Elixir · Phoenix

Pocket Pro / Fleetwood Brief

Currently engaged on a voice-driven AI golf coaching product, working through founder brief and product discovery.

Discovery phase

Homelab Infra

Proxmox cluster running Debian LXC, Docker, Caddy reverse proxy, Cloudflare DNS, Tailscale, Pi-hole. Claude Code as primary dev environment throughout.

Proxmox · Docker · Tailscale

CI/CD Platform Infra

Self-hosted CI/CD for the homelab. GitHub Actions build immutable SHA-tagged GHCR images; ephemeral Tailscale runners deploy by Compose over the tailnet, repo as single source of truth for each stack. Single-source toolchain pinning, self-arming deploy secrets, shared Prometheus / Grafana / Tempo / OTLP observability.

GitHub Actions · GHCR · Tailscale

05 / Education

Foundations.

1991–1995 University of Bristol BEng (Hons), Electronic Engineering

Let's talk.

Open to permanent roles or contract from late spring. UK or remote. Strong preference for teams shipping into real constraints — regulated, legacy, agentic, take your pick.

[email protected] →

Bath, UK · BA2 0PS · UK · EU hours