I lead a platform engineering department, in the United Kingdom. Twenty years in technology, fourteen of them leading teams.
The part of the job I care most about is growing people into roles they did not think they were capable of. One of the people I worked with started on a first line support desk and was a tech lead by the time I left. Another went from engineer to principal. In consulting, three people asked to work with me again on whatever I picked up next, and elsewhere someone I had worked with before joined me when I took another role.
Five of the twenty years were in Chicago, so before you ask: Tortorice’s deep dish, though I will take Lou’s if that is what is going. I was a DevOps tech lead at Walgreens, in Deerfield. Since returning I have worked with US-headquartered companies from the UK, at OneView Commerce and across McKinsey.
I build teams: platform, cloud and DevOps groups taken from a handful of engineers to departments. I have owned the cloud estate and its cost, and reduced that cost while the business grew. I sit in the monthly business reviews with the cloud provider, and I have signed an enterprise agreement that took a product multi-cloud. In the teams I run I have backed early adoption of agentic AI-assisted development, the testing guardrails as much as the tooling.
Security is a thread through it: two degrees in it, and two years at Tessian. There I chaired the Architecture Guild, the group that set technical direction across the engineering organisation, and planned and ran the company’s first whole-product disaster recovery test.
At QuantumBlack I reported to the CTO and sat on the leadership teams for Cloud and for QuantumBlack Labs, led a cloud architecture team of close to thirty across three regions with a manager in each, and was accountable for cloud and tooling spend across several products. At McKinsey, where my official title was engagement manager, I ran the platform and a twenty-five person team across five sub-teams, and built the deployer that stood a full analytics environment up in a customer’s own cloud in about an hour.
I have been in incident response in one form or another for most of my career, starting on the non-production estate for an electronic medical records programme. At one place we engineered the failovers so thoroughly that there were no incidents to talk about, which turns out to be its own kind of problem.
I still take hack days as an engineer, and the last two went on build tooling. I use the same agentic tooling for the management work as well, not only for code.
Where I have worked
Arbor Education, Head of Platform Engineering
Tessian (Proofpoint), Architecture Guild Chair and Platform Architect
McKinsey & Company and QuantumBlack, five years: cloud and DevOps engineering leadership, then technical leadership on the platform team
OneView Commerce, DevOps Manager
Velocix (Nokia), Technical Lead
Walgreens, DevOps Technical Lead, Deerfield, Illinois (Fortune 50 US pharmacy retailer)
Sectors: EdTech, cyber security, professional services, retail, telecoms and e-commerce.
Education
MBA Essentials, London School of Economics
MSc Information Security and Assurance and BSc Information Technology (Security), Western Governors University
Reach out on LinkedIn if you would like to connect.
Robert Small 