Experience

Seventeen years making infrastructure behave.

There is no straight line from a biochemistry degree to sovereign-cloud architecture. I found the field by building in it. Seventeen years on, the constant has held: I design infrastructure, I build it, I run it, and I am usually the person who checks the numbers before they cost someone real money.

Three chapters

ZainTECH

Head of Presales

Dec 2023 to present · GCC

Hired to lead presales. I started by building it.

I was ZainTECH's first dedicated presales hire, so I had to build the function before I could run it. The team was sizing complex cloud deals off stale spreadsheet exports. I gave it a discovery-led method, the bill-of-quantities calculators it still runs on, and an intake automation I part-built myself that now routes work across the whole of presales, not just my cloud unit.

The work lives on the seam between technical and commercial: discovery, sizing, solution, pricing, and the customer conversation. On a PCI-regulated payments platform I caught a vendor sizing bare metal where virtualisation was the right answer, corrected for the contention ratios their numbers ignored, and stepped around an Oracle-on-VMware licensing trap with targeted KVM bundles. That is the part of the job I am known for.

The last set of eyes before the proposal ships.

Exponential-e

Senior Solutions Consultant

Aug 2021 to Nov 2023 · UK public sector

Where getting the infrastructure wrong actually matters.

My UK public-sector chapter: technical authority on large health, government and education tenders, turning regulatory-and-requirement soup into infrastructure a client could actually defend. I led an NHS foundation-trust engagement end to end, pairing enterprise object storage with a hyperconverged VMware cluster. I designed it, proposed it, presented it, and won it.

On a national pathology-imaging programme I was the supporting architect under a lead, and I will say that plainly rather than claim the whole thing. My part was the exacting work that keeps a clinical platform safe to build on. I fed the sizing and built the bill of quantities with the hardware vendor. Compatibility against three medical-imaging vendors' guidelines was mine to check as well. Knowing the difference between what you led and what you supported is its own kind of credibility.

Designed it, proposed it, presented it, won it.

iomart

Solutions Architect, Technical & Commercial

Aug 2011 to Aug 2021 · UK

Ten years with a foot in the rack and a foot in the P&L.

The decade that forged the technical-and-commercial identity. I owned product pricing and portfolio for a set of hosting brands and ran vendor negotiations, while also leading R&D and solution architecture for the IaaS division and standing behind the sales floor as its technical authority.

The signature of those years was that I was hands-on. In 2014 I built the quote for a GPU-accelerated VDI deal, priced it, took delivery of the servers, racked them myself, installed the operating system, and ran a proof of concept partitioning the GPUs across virtual machines until I hit the driver limits of the day. Later I validated high-density GPU nodes for AI and machine-learning workloads: thermal stability, performance baselines, and the datacentre physics of power and cooling that most cloud architects never touch. For five months I also built a six-person deployments team from nothing, hired it, wrote the processes, and did a great deal of the racking and building myself. That is where the remote-hands reality of a datacentre stopped being theory for me.

Racking GPU servers before 'AI infrastructure' was a phrase.

If something here resonates

Most of my best conversations start with someone describing a system that will not quite behave: a cloud decision, a sovereignty question, a disaster-recovery design that keeps them up at night. If that is you, I am always happy to think it through.

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