Software engineer · London & remote
I’ve been writing software for twenty years. The last few have been mostly about AI — production LLM systems, agents, retrieval, and the engineering around them.
I work hands-on across the stack and prefer being close to the code. I’ve led teams and architectures, but my best work happens when I’m still in the editor — shaping a system, fixing what’s slow, and shipping something useful at the end of the week.
I’ve worked across start-ups, scale-ups, SMEs and large enterprise — mostly in Python, mostly on backend, data, and infrastructure problems. Recently the work is increasingly AI-shaped: LLM applications, retrieval over real-world knowledge, agents that call tools, and the eval and ops discipline that keeps any of it running.
Available for contract through my limited company, shipit.ltd.
Production LLM systems — assistants, chatbots, multi-step agents, and document/workflow automation. The model itself is rarely the hardest part; most of the engineering sits around it: retrieval, tool integration, evals, observability, cost and latency, integration with the rest of the team’s stack.
Python services and APIs. Tested, observable, replaceable.
Python FastAPI Django DRF Flask Celery SQS / SNS
Infrastructure as code, CI/CD, the platform engineering to keep things shipping.
AWS GCP Terraform Lambda ECS / Fargate Kubernetes Docker GitHub Actions
Pipelines, warehouses, and the modelling that makes raw data useful.
Postgres BigQuery Redshift Airflow DBT Spark Pandas Athena
System design, technical hiring, mentoring. Helping teams get unstuck.
System design DDD Microservices 12-factor Hiring Mentoring
Agile that ships. CI/CD, code review, pair programming, tests that pay for themselves.
Scrum XP Kanban TDD BDD CI/CD
Frontier model behaviour, agent design patterns, eval-driven development, voice and multimodal interfaces.
Claude GPT Gemini MCP Voice
Twenty years across freelance, permanent, and contract work. Selected highlights below; full history on LinkedIn or in the CV.
New microservice for credit & risk decisioning, plus the data platform and grass-roots ingestion / modelling capabilities. ETL with Python lambdas and PySpark on Glue, replication with DMS, ELT with DBT and kleene.ai, reporting in Looker. FastAPI on ECS Fargate, all provisioned with Terraform.
FastAPI Terraform AWS Glue DBT ECS Fargate
Working with engineers and data scientists to deliver products and insights through GFK’s market-intelligence platform. Deploying ML models on Kubernetes (GCP), GraphQL APIs, MLFlow, ELT inside Postgres.
GCP Kubernetes MLFlow GraphQL
Data-engineering support for a validation sprint in the renewable-energy space. Airflow for orchestration, AWS for infrastructure (Fargate, Lambdas, S3 data lake, Athena), terraform-managed.
Airflow AWS Athena Terraform
Took over all backend engineering — supporting live iOS/Android apps, building data capabilities, technical hiring, BI platform, integration and load testing, localisation, and helping the team move to Scrum.
Backend lead BI Load testing
Helping the scale-up move rapidly through commercialisation. Recruitment of engineers, scrum master and CTO. Drove data collection and best practices, built out a data lake and initial pipelines while maintaining product delivery pace.
Data lake Recruitment Scale-up
Assisting with the multi-million-pound launch of heycar.co.uk — ongoing product development, load testing, backend engineer recruitment, and taking over backend work as incubation staff rolled off.
Launch Load testing Hiring
Final phase of a market-predictions product for shipping. Cross-functional incubation team bringing data-science insight into deliverable software products.
Cross-functional Data science
Cross-training data scientists in engineering, shaping process, implementing agile frameworks, individual tutoring, and technical leadership across the department.
Tech leadership Mentoring
Working directly with data scientists and delivery managers to productionise POCs and ETL pipelines — from warehouse / in-store stock replenishment to checkout optimisation.
ETL Production ML
Building, releasing and supporting the Sainsbury’s Groceries Android app — CI pipeline for continual automated release, refactoring the legacy codebase.
Android CI
Designed and built Sainsbury’s voice-shopping Alexa skill — from initial development through systems integration to internal and closed-group customer trials. Direct work with Amazon.
Alexa Voice UI
Integrating two core services for the latest in-game events feature, plus rebuilding the legacy application that serves and controls the company’s Facebook applications.
Python Integration
Leading a team of Python developers building and maintaining systems on Google AppEngine, Container Engine, Compute Engine, and Flexible Environment. Reporting and analytics with BigQuery and DataDog. Backlog management, hiring, training, technical roadmap.
Team lead GCP BigQuery DataDog
Maintaining and enhancing a suite of products supporting games at scale on Facebook, Apple App Store, Google Play and Amazon App Store.
Python Cross-platform
Product development on a suite of ad creation/serving tools. Initially front-end (JavaScript SPA), moved into back-end (Django micro-service APIs) and DevOps (Ansible, Terraform on AWS). EC2, ELB, S3, CloudFront, Redshift, Elastic Transcoder, Kinesis, RDS.
Django Microservices Ansible Terraform AWS
Production work, tight deadlines, microsites and campaign work in Python, PHP, ASPX, HTML, CSS, JavaScript.
Full stack Multi-language
University job — member services, IT support, web/mail/file servers, information architecture, internal business processes.
Freelance work going back further than the formal contracts above — graphic design, web and app development, infrastructure and hosting for individuals and small companies. shipit Ltd incorporated 01/01/2018, self-employed prior.
Project Planning & Control, Programming, Database Design, Information Systems & Architectures, 3D Graphics & Animation, Video Production, Business Information Systems, Games Development.
Intermediate Computing, Business Calculations, Business Information Systems, Software Development, Visual Basic, C++, Computer Systems, Systems Analysis & Design, Web Design, Database Management, Networking.
Basic computing skills, database design, project management, design & presentation.
Email is the easiest: david@shipit.ltd. You can also drop a note below.