Overview

I'm an engineering leader with over 20 years of experience, currently Head of Engineering at a private markets fintech. I report to the CTO and meet weekly with the CEO. Over the last two years I've built the engineering organisation from a single team of seven into a group of around twenty spanning four countries, covering product development, data, QA and DevSecOps. My focus throughout my career has been on building teams - in talent and in culture - and on delivering software that moves the business, whether that's growing an organisation, taking cost and risk out of core operations, or shipping working tooling myself.

I've worked primarily in finance, but also in biotech, visualisation, simulation and messaging middleware, and I've led internationally distributed teams to deliver both for customers and internally. I've always found myself able to pick up the technologies and skills needed to work effectively in new environments. As a lifelong learner, I gained a masters from UCL in Visualisation and separately a masters from the OU in philosophy while working full time. I hold an online certificate in Asset Management from the Wharton school, which I studied as a way of deepening my knowledge of the Asset Management business.

I've used technologies and languages across the gamut. Most recently focussing on web technologies, but I've programmed professionally in C#, javascript (top 1% stackoverflow), scala, java, lua, go, VBA, and have dabbled with elixir, erlang, rust, python, haskell, scheme, clojure and many more. I enjoy working in technology stacks that are unfamiliar as I find that different perspectives can be valuable.

Though I've lots of experience developing software as part of teams, building up others and sharing knowledge is also important to me, so I've presented both internally on emerging technology topics like blockchain, but also externally, at the British Computer Society annual conference on the real time web (2010), HTML5 web apps (2011) and the future of web development (2014). At Caplin, I posted regularly to the Caplin tech blog, including a post explaining some of the more confusing aspects of javascript that was picked up by hackernews and reddit and eventually brought down the blog server.

I'm a fan of agile methodologies - particuarly the focus on delivering value to customers and the commitment to continuous improvement. I've been using agile techniques since reading the extreme programming book in 2004. For most of that time I've followed a scrum process professionally, so I recently made it official and acquired a Professional Scrum Master (PSM) certification.

You can contact me by email at me@adamiley.com or phone on +44 7854433517.

Employment

1. June 2024 - present S64 Capital is a private markets fintech working with the largest asset managers and private banks to democratise private markets.

   • Head of Engineering

     I report to the CTO and meet weekly with the CEO. I inherited a single team of around seven and built it into an engineering organisation of about twenty across four countries: two cross-functional product teams (with engineers in Spain and Singapore and embedded QA), a data team of four, a DevSecOps function, and a developer dedicated to internal tooling. I hired most of that team myself. Leading it has required that I learn the private markets space deeply, and involved taking responsibility for the product as a whole, ensuring changes are delivered by configuration rather than customisation.

   • Architecture and delivery

     The platform runs as single-tenant SaaS across four Azure regions on three continents (France, the UK, Australia and Japan), with placement driven by client data-residency requirements; the APAC footprint was added during my tenure. Infrastructure is codified in Terraform, and I drove a move to Kubernetes to enable per-PR preview environments, giving QA and design a place to review changes before merge and keeping the main branch stable. I've stayed close to the code and architecture - reviewing pull requests, designing larger pieces, and pushing for a central data lake serving the whole business rather than just the SaaS product.

   • Tooling improving cost and risk

     I built a NAV and document-extraction tool that lets the operations team self-serve extraction of many PDFs into a single reviewable spreadsheet, replacing the need to open hundreds of individual documents by hand. It cut a recurring monthly task from eight hours to one across ten funds - roughly 840 hours a year - while materially reducing the risk of manual error in NAV data.

   • AI and Innovation

     I led a number of AI initiatives: MCP interfaces to our product, a fully autonomous developer, and a 'vibe coding for small internal tools' framework that produced several tools which became the preferred way of achieving key business tasks. The preview-environment work above was a deliberate foundation for this - I wanted every change, including AI-generated ones, reviewed as working software before merge, so we could adopt agentic tooling more deeply without lowering our quality and maintainability bar.
2. July 2021 - June 2024 (evenings and weekends) Hivekit is a startup building a new kind of realtime, operations platform, making the physical world as programmable as the digital world. I was involved very early on, designing and coding closely with the founder on the core technology, particularly on the realtime 'hivescript' scripting language, and the golang server in general.
3. October 2019 - June 2024 Caplin Systems create multiasset trading systems on mobile and web. Although there is a focus on FX trading, Caplin technologies have been used to trade Equities, FI, Structured Products, cryptocurrencies and even cars.

   • Director of Engineering

     The engineering team at Caplin consists of 40 engineers, including QA specialists and developers, two technical writers following a docs-as-code methodology, and the infrastructure and cloud team. Working with the CTO, project managers and product owners we restructured the engineering department around small, highly crossfunctional teams, and changed the way that work was split up between the teams. I owned the annual tooling and infrastructure budget, and planned and made the case for headcount growth.

   • Commercial input

     As Director of Engineering I sat on the pricing committee, which reviewed every client proposal before it was sent, giving engineering a voice in the commercial shape of each deal.

   • Training

     To help increase the overall level of the teams, and encourage cross team communication, I set up an internal technical mentorship programme where every engineer of mid level and junior spent some time every month with a senior or lead on developing their skills. I encouraged the leads to create and share training material that they used.
4. 2016-2019 Working as a consultant through my company Binary Cannon I've been Head of Development and Emerging Technologies for DWS (previously Deutsche Bank Asset Management).

   • Building the team

     I designed our recruitment challenge and hired a team of front end and back end developers that frequently gets described to me by the people on it as "the best team I've ever worked on".

   • Head of Passives Front Office IT

     Managing the IT team supporting the index tracking portfolio management function, covering approximately 170 funds and 70bn AUM. Overseeing the correct functioning of the passives maangement system, primarily implemented in C#, VBA, Oracle and Access. Working with the portfolio managers and with the head of the Passives business to set a strategy for future passives IT.

   • Integrating existing talent

     I inherited a situation with geographically dispersed teams working in silos. I started creating cross location teams and mentoring, and began the process of helping all the separate teams work together as one competency.

   • Strategy

     Having identified a lack of institutional knowledge as a key problem within the organisation we created a platform team that grew the shared artefacts. This strategy saved projects 30 million euros in duplicated work over the 3 years. Having developed an interesting approach to state management for our applications, I lead the team that open sourced it, the first piece of software to be developed at DB and go through the open sourcing process.

   • Innovation and Emerging Technologies

     I put together a small POC team to build a proof of concept blockchain application. I wrote the smart contracts for it myself, and in a few weeks we delivered a demo that we were able to show to key business stakeholders for running a fund on the blockchain. I gave well received talks on how the technology worked for board members and for a wider audience. We also investigated chat bots and NLP. As well as enjoying new technology and being able to showcase it, I'm also focused on making sure that it solves a real business problem.
5. 2014-2016 Improbable Worlds is a startup building one of the first simulation-as-a-service products with an initial application to games, but also targetting infrastructure simulation and other physically based simulations. The core technology is written in Scala, but integrations with games and game engines is mainly C#.

   • API design

     has been a particular focus of mine. I've led the design of the way that our features are exposed to end users from initial discussions through to implementation and iteration.

   • Hiring

     Improbable has been growing quickly and I've been part of the group working out our interview process and performing the interviews.
6. 2007-2014 Caplin Systems make the infrastructure to build multi asset single page trading applications running in the web browser using HTML and javascript. The streaming server it connects to is a mature product written in C, and integration with the back end systems is usually done in Java. I've worked on systems and designs for banks including Barclays Capital, Royal Bank of Canada, Standard Bank, Citigroup and BNP Paribas.

   • Technical Lead

     onsite on customer projects delivering web trading platforms with streaming data for FX, FI and CDS asset classes. Leading a diverse team with people working on multiple continents.

   • Product Architect

     for our Streamlink library in javascript and java which provides the connection and messaging to our proprietary server.

   • Training and Innovation

     I was responsible for training new hires and coaching new Technical leads. I also trained customers in our technology, most recently Nomura. My role includes promoting the company tech blog within development and organising our HackDays.

   • Line Manager

     I line manage 5 developers including a product architect and two senior developers; this involves organising appraisals, training and providing coaching.
7. 2004-2006 Genedata AG are a Basel, Switzerland based company that makes a suite of java products for analysing the results of biological gene chip experiments.

   • Visualisations

     Programmed the user interface and analysis code for visualisers. Working mainly in Java with RMI, Swing and WebStart.

   • Maintainence of Shared Code

     Part of a small team responsible for the code shared across the company. Reviewed code for correctness and style. Communicated important changes between teams.
8. 2000-2003 IBM Websphere MQSeries Everyplace is a Java product that integrates with IBM's main MQSeries offering designed to bring MQ messaging to mobile devices.
   

   • Lead developer

     Worked as lead developer on the 'out of the box experience' for IBM's MQSeries Everyplace product in Java. Took part in code reviews, used Junit, assisted other developers to learn unit testing.

   • Performance

     Responsible for performance on IBM pervasive middleware, implemented and tested performance improvements, designed and implemented extensible reconfigurable harness for generating thousands of clients of load, recovering from failures, recording results.

   • Participation

     Helped organise site wide events, took part in reading groups on best practice, refactoring and XP.

Education

1. 2009-2017 MA in Philosophy (studied part time with the Open University).
2. 2007-2008 MSc with distinction in Visualisation in Virtual Environments from University College London. A one-year full-time course covering computer graphics, virtual reality, machine vision and imaging technology.
3. 1996-2000 BSc (Hons) 2.1 in Computer Science at the University of York.
4. 1994-1996 A levels in Computing (A), Physics (A), Mathematics Pure and Applied (A) and English Literature (A) at Berwick Upon Tweed High School Sixth Form.