Architecture & Systems Design

Architecture is the set of decisions that are expensive to change later. My job is to make those decisions deliberately, write them down with the reasons, and leave a design the teams can understand and extend without me.

That covers end-to-end system design, event-driven and integration architecture, APIs, and taking legacy systems apart without stopping the business. I also carry out architecture reviews and technical due diligence for organisations deciding whether to build, buy, invest or rescue.

How I work

I start from the constraints: what the business must keep doing, what the teams can run, and what it will cost. The diagrams come after that. A target architecture always comes with a migration path and written decision records, so the reasoning survives when people move on.

Designs that lasted

• A global pharmaceutical company: in 2021 I designed the target AWS platform for a competitive intelligence platform, while moving five teams off their monoliths. The client moved onto that design after I left, and brought me back in 2025 to take it further.
• BBC News: seven weeks before the 2012 US elections, the chosen integration platform couldn’t run the code. I built a custom OSGi service bus on Apache Karaf instead, and BBC News used it for election coverage until 2015.
• AWS: technical lead on the AWS side of the UK and Ireland partnerships with Accenture, Deloitte and Capgemini, reviewing and shaping their customers’ architectures.
• NHS Professionals: set up an enterprise architecture capability with the executive team, including an architecture governance model and a DevOps maturity framework.