Working history
The long version of the working life.
The short version is the CV.
I asked Grok to write this in September 2026 from my public sites, from Companies House, from a talk I gave in May 2025, and from corrections I later made to the record. I have read it. I am happy for it to stand as the long version of my working life. The short version is the CV.
I was born in Seaham in February 1992 and I still work from the North East. My weekday job is document data capture — invoices, orders, the messy paper companies wish were already data.
My grandmother gave me the shape of my career before I had one. My grandad had worked on Blue Streak. She told me the firm had kept the engineers out of management and then made poor decisions. Never let anyone tell you that you cannot manage because you are too good an engineer. Become a good engineer first. Then become a good manager. I treated that as a plan.
At St Aidan’s I took Maths, Further Maths and Biology. From sixteen to eighteen, in the Christmas seasons, I did data-entry for Royal Mail. Casual work. School still running. Not a profession.
I read Computer Science at Newcastle University from 2010 to 2013. In the second or third year I tried to start a company with two friends, Pieran Marris and Charles Barry. The idea was simple: take old university computers, refurbish them, sell them on. We were working with the person responsible for decommissioning the machines and getting rid of them. He wanted a better use for them too. We incorporated as JPLEX Ltd in February 2012, from Rotterdam House on the Quayside. I was a director for five months. People higher up in the university would not let us do it. The company was dissolved the following year. I describe it as an exploration. The first proper job came off the university jobs board.
I joined CloudTrade on 22 July 2013. I was the fifth person in the company. There were five of us. It grew to seven later that year. The other engineer was Richard Develyn, the technical founder, based in Blyth. David Cocks and Richard Manson ran commercial from Southampton.
The product was already the product that would occupy the next thirteen years: take a human-readable document — usually a PDF invoice or an order — and turn it into structured data a finance system could use. E-invoicing, in other words, and the rest of the paper that sits around it.
In the very early days Develyn ran the team and we used Extreme Programming. When the team started to grow I took the people. He did not like to mentor. I did. I was leading the actual builders before I had a title for it. He held the technical vision. I was the person writing the system. After about the first three years that split was clear, and later he moved into an external-facing role with sales and investors. Once I was running the team we did it my way — semi-improvised, not a named methodology.
In 2013 and 2014 the company put product development in the North East, at Sunderland Software Centre on Tavistock Place. A Journal piece from those months is the first time my name appears in print. Develyn and Michael Thomson, it said, were now based there full-time. Everyone else was still in Southampton.
I was software engineer, then technical lead. In 2018, around the time Calculus Capital invested, we were hiring and growing hardest, and we formalised my role: Head of Engineering. By the autumn of 2021 the engineering group was about twelve people.
Then came Covid. Those were the hardest years. We were hit financially almost at once — revenue down about a fifth, because when customers stop sending invoices the meter stops. We had to go remote in a hurry. The work was treated as key-worker work. Some of the documents were NHS and government documents. The product did not change. What changed was the room. Holding the team together, keeping morale, keeping the work coherent from kitchen tables — that was the job as much as the software. Then, through the return-to-office years, we had to do all of that and run a sale at the same time.
On 14 October 2021 Advanced bought CloudTrade. Calculus later said the investment had returned four times in a little over three years. I was responsible for the whole tech team. We were growing fast again. Bigger names were arriving, with much larger volumes than we had handled before. Most of that stretch was scaling — the systems and the people. A consultancy helped put the company in front of buyers. Technical due diligence with Advanced was part of my work in the run-up, six months to a year of walking them through the system. It was not the main job. After the sale the existing leadership retired. New bosses arrived. There were about six quiet months, then Advanced’s processes. I stayed.
Inside Advanced I ran the CloudTrade engineering group. On the tech side the work was integration: onto Advanced’s processes, onto Azure, into the wider ecosystem. On the people side it was two jobs at once — bringing a small-company team into a much larger one, and steering them through whatever was happening in the rest of the company. The team grew from about twelve developers to about thirty, some of them Advanced people folded in.
Advanced itself was having a difficult few years. It is a private-equity-owned group, assembled from many acquisitions. In 2023 a new chief executive arrived, the brand became OneAdvanced, and the stated plan was a strategy refresh: concentrate money on a shorter list of high-growth sectors. Restructures followed. Other products were later taken out of the portfolio. Holding the team together through all of that — the integration, the politics, the weather in the wider company — was a substantial part of the job.
Eventually the portfolio was cut again and our product was phased out. We had a year of notice. It was wound down slowly. We used the year to prepare the next stage.
The next company was already under way.
While we were still at Advanced, Steve Britton, Calum Formby and I began Cloud Connect. Steve had been in sales at CloudTrade and then Advanced since the mid-2010s. Calum was a former colleague. The three of us started unofficially. We incorporated once a customer would pay. Advanced knew.
Steve was made redundant first, so Steve went onto the paperwork first — Cloud Connect Services Ltd, November 2024. Calum followed in March 2025, the week Steve announced the public launch. I left last, kept drawing Advanced salary so the new company could hold cash, and went onto the register in July 2025. The appointment dates are the order we left. They are not the order we began.
The three founders hold equal shares. None of us is over 25 percent. Votes among the three are split three ways. Developers hold a substantial stake as well.
Cloud Connect does the same work CloudTrade did: invoices and orders, high volume, high accuracy, into finance systems, now with AI beside the older rules. I am CTO. Steve is CEO. Calum is COO. The public team also includes Joshua Harvey, Cameron Whittle and Jake Attiwell. My own figures, on the CV, are customers at 50,000 invoices a year and about £600,000 of annual recurring revenue.
In May 2025 I gave the talk that still carries my grandmother’s sentence as its title: Good Engineers Can Be Good Managers: Never Let Anyone Tell You Otherwise.
Tyneside Software is later, and smaller. In 2026 I set up an evening room in North Tyneside. One night a week I hire a few university students to work on things. They get some pocket money and some commercial experience. I get extra hands for ideas I want to build, and we have some fun. My children sit in as well. We ship websites, field tools, a logistics board with live phones on a map. There is a small cleaning company and a charity page for Howden Ward: paid cleans at thirty pounds for two hours, and free welcome-home cleans for new parents. Day jobs and school stay in place.
I am neurodivergent. I write that my children are too. The evening room is built with that in mind.
The work, from Sunderland Software Centre to Cloud Connect, is still the same problem. A document arrives that a person can read. A system needs data. Someone has to make the one into the other without losing the truth of the page.
For the record
Cloud Trade Technologies Ltd 07039186. JPLEX Ltd 07969490. Cloud Connect Services Ltd 16082419. Tyneside Software Ltd 17326934. Tyneside Cleaning Ltd 17338077.