00 — Work

Work

Twelve years at one company looks, from the outside, like the absence of a story — no job-hopping, no string of different logos to point at. From the inside it was the opposite: the company, the product, and my own role inside it kept changing shape, just slower and less visibly than switching employers every couple of years would have made it look. What follows is that stretch at FashionUnited — an independent platform for the international fashion industry, established in over 30 countries and 9 languages — told as a small number of eras rather than a single flat job title, each with what I actually shipped and what changed because of it. The era boundaries are approximate — in reality each one blurred into the next.

Not everything fits an era. Along the way I also moved the whole company onto a single work-tracking system, turned tribal knowledge into a markdown handbook, and kept a fleet of devices secure and low-touch — the unglamorous work that makes the glamorous work possible.

Career chapter 1 of 4

2013 – 2014

IT Project Manager

What I shipped

  • Drove the responsive redesign of fashionunited.com — new desktop and mobile templates that became the foundation of the modern news platform.
  • Learned the product and the industry from the inside, just as fashion's readership shifted to phones.

What changed

The core product was mobile-ready at exactly the moment that started to matter.

Career chapter 2 of 4

2014 – 2019

IT Manager

What I shipped

  • Built the multi-market platform architecture: 30+ locale-specific domains served from one codebase, with a custom routing layer and shared component library.
  • Introduced the Elixir/Phoenix GraphQL API — domain-separated Postgres databases behind one API powering every market and integration.
  • Moved the infrastructure to Google Cloud: multi-cluster Kubernetes across EU and US, all of it managed as code with Terraform.

What changed

Launching a new market became configuration instead of a rebuild — the platform stopped being the bottleneck to international expansion, and there were no snowflake servers left to be afraid of.

Career chapter 3 of 4

2019 – 2024

IT Manager

What I shipped

  • Migrated the frontend to a Next.js progressive web app, shared across all markets.
  • Made releases boring: continuous deployment on merge for API and frontend, with monitoring that catches issues before readers report them.
  • Built the data side: a BigQuery warehouse, privacy-friendly analytics without cookie-banner debt, and self-serve dashboards so leadership answers its own questions.

What changed

Releases became non-events a small team ships daily without ceremony, and decisions started running on data instead of gut feel.

Career chapter 4 of 4

2024 – present

AI-powered Engineering Manager

What I shipped

  • Led the migration off Next.js to React Router and Vite across all 30+ markets, market by market with rollback plans — dramatically faster builds, lower recurring infrastructure cost, and a fully open-source stack.
  • Authored and executed the editorial AI roadmap: press-release processing, translation, scheduling, and cross-market syndication as code-based, version-controlled pipelines with human approval gates.
  • Shipped an email agent for the news inbox — 50–100 messages a day classified and routed at roughly 90% accuracy, so the inbox no longer needs a human first pass.
  • Rolled AI tooling out to the whole company, engineers and non-engineers alike, with a maturity framework covering every role.

What changed

The job stopped being about running IT and became about leading AI-powered engineering — freeing editorial capacity for original journalism and making the fashion industry more efficient and transparent.

The eras above are the day job. The side projects are where I build for myself, end to end, on my own schedule.

See the side projects