From Operations to Engineering

My career evolved from understanding operational problems to building the systems used to address them. The common thread is staying close to the user, the decision, and the implementation.

2005–2023 · Foundation

Military Intelligence, Systems, and Decision Support

Before software became the centre of my work, I spent roughly eighteen years in U.S. Army military intelligence and technical leadership. The work centred on making useful decisions from incomplete information, designing information flows across organisations and systems, and understanding how people actually operate under real constraints.

That experience still shapes how I engineer systems now. I tend to start with the user, the decision, the operating environment, and the failure modes before choosing a technology. By 2021, software development had become a primary part of my work rather than a side activity; the later milestones show the deliberate move into modern software engineering, integration, architecture, and applied AI.

  • Systems thinking
  • Decision support
  • Information architecture
  • Operational analysis
  • Technical leadership
  • Stakeholder translation
Learning

MSc Computer Science: Applied AI Research

Completed MSc Computer Science study and dissertation work at Keele University, with the award pending. The final project built and evaluated a reproducible knowledge-augmented visual question answering pipeline and treated a negative result as an engineering finding rather than something to hide.

Skills:
  • Python
  • PyTorch
  • Visual question answering
  • Knowledge graphs
  • ConceptNet
  • Experiment design
  • Reproducible evaluation
Transition

Discovery, Architecture, and Hands-On Delivery at USAICOE

Expanded from individual software and platform delivery into broader problem discovery, solution architecture, data and AI evaluation, and senior technical advisory work while continuing to build operational workflows and prototypes.

Skills:
  • Palantir Foundry / Vantage
  • OSDK
  • TypeScript
  • React
  • Solution architecture
  • Applied AI evaluation
  • Stakeholder discovery
Milestone

From Application Delivery to Data Platforms and Integration

Took on software and data-solutions responsibilities in an Army experimentation environment, combining hands-on development with containerised platforms, systems integration, architecture, and technical evaluation of emerging tools.

Skills:
  • Docker
  • Cloud-native systems
  • Data architecture
  • Systems integration
  • Technical evaluation
  • Solution architecture
Transition

Modern Software Engineering and Production Delivery

Entered the Army Software Factory engineering programme and moved into production software delivery using modern full-stack practices. The work combined user discovery, iterative delivery, and hands-on engineering rather than treating software as a purely technical exercise.

Skills:
  • Java
  • Spring Boot
  • React
  • TypeScript
  • PostgreSQL
  • TDD
  • Agile delivery