Tech.
Leader.
Builder.

A deliberate choice to start from the ground up. By 2015, leading a cloud transformation that changed everything.

In 2011 I made the decision to enter the corporate technology world for the first time. I chose to start at the helpdesk, not because I had to, but because I knew it was the right foundation. Within a short time I was moving up, applying everything I had built over years of self-directed learning and previous experience.

In 2015, the opportunity to lead a cloud transformation program was the turning point. It touched people, process, and technology all at once. It was bigger than anything I was ready for in that environment. I pushed through and delivered it anyway. That was the moment the career I had always wanted fully clicked into place.

A decade of public sector transformation. Cloud was not welcome. I earned every inch.

My approach was deliberate. Find the internal champions first. Prove it works in a contained environment before asking anyone to commit at scale. Remove every possible reason to say no. Always lead from the front. I wasn't going to ask engineers to change how they worked if I wasn't willing to work that way myself.

The hardest part wasn't the technology. It was getting our customer departments to adopt what we were building. Engineering habits and stakeholder confidence had to move together, and neither moved fast.

What we built in that decade was real. Infrastructure as code across Azure and AWS. CI/CD pipelines replacing manual provisioning. Hydra, a bespoke cloud spend platform. A partnership with ACT Health through the EPIC Digital Health Record implementation. Cloud and Office 365 transformations across ACT Education and ACT CIT. The cultural shift in engineering is what I'm proudest of, and the team that grew out of it.

Invested in the ones others overlooked. Some ended up at AWS and Microsoft. That's the metric that matters.

When I moved into a director-level position, I made a deliberate choice about who to invest in. Not the obvious candidates. The helpdesk staff. The engineers two or three years into their careers with no bad habits yet, but with trajectories I could see clearly even if they couldn't.

I've always kept an eye on the ones others overlook. It's something I never had myself, and it's something I've always been determined to provide for others.

What I built was a combination of things that only work together. Real ownership of real systems from day one. Industry best practice as the standard, not the aspiration. A genuine safety net for failure, no career consequences for trying and getting it wrong. And constant coaching, not from a distance, but alongside them.

Some of them went on to roles at AWS and Microsoft. Some I no longer needed to lead because they had simply outgrown me. That's the outcome I was aiming for.

From consumer to contributor. Now helping shape the infrastructure the world runs on.

The shift that surprised me most wasn't the scale. It was the perspective. I spent a decade inside government helping organisations get the most out of Microsoft technology. Now I'm on the other side, helping shape it. That transition, from consumer to contributor, changed how I see the entire industry.

At Azure Networking, the programs I lead sit at the infrastructure layer of the internet. Hardware refreshes, card migrations, decommissions and upgrades that feed directly into next-generation network capacity. Millions of customers depend on our Edge sites. The network doesn't stop. Programs have to move around it.

What makes this level genuinely hard is the ambiguity. There is rarely a clear playbook at the frontier. But that's also what I find most energising. I bring my full experience to bear on mapping out what doesn't exist yet, understanding the problem, documenting the process, building the operating rhythm, and making sure the person who comes after me doesn't have to start from scratch.

That last part matters to me. Eliminating ambiguity for whoever comes next isn't a nice-to-have. It's part of the job.

Started with curiosity. Couldn't stop. Applying the same discipline to AI that I've used across government and global infrastructure.

It started with curiosity. The same pattern I recognise from cloud in 2015. Once something clicks as genuinely important, I go deep. What I kept finding was that the AI conversation was stuck on tools. Nobody was asking the harder question: how do you actually build an operating model around this?

That's the question I'm building toward. As a practitioner applying program discipline to a space most people are still figuring out. AI that augments how I think, decide, and execute. Not AI that replaces the judgement I've spent fifteen years developing.