25 years across trading systems, cloud-native AWS architecture,
DevOps pipelines, and security-first API design — end to end.
I build backend systems for performance-critical environments. My work focuses on real-time data processing, trading infrastructure, and API platforms where inefficiency compounds quickly and correctness is non-negotiable.
Over 25 years I've delivered systems across financial trading, fintech, energy, retail, and government — from streaming Betfair market data to event-driven pipelines on AWS. I've expanded steadily across full-stack, DevOps, and DevSecOps practices: the engineering problems I solve are increasingly end-to-end.
I work across the full stack — architecture through implementation and operations — with a bias toward simplicity, observability, and operational correctness over clever abstractions.
25 years across Java, cloud, trading systems, architecture, DevOps, and security — covering the full engineering lifecycle from design to production.
Production-grade Java automated trading framework using Betfair Exchange API and Betfair Streaming API. Spring Boot event-driven architecture with proprietary signal engine covering Weight of Money, LTP dynamics, price velocity, and order flow imbalance.
Pre-social-media photo sharing platform connecting venue photographers in pubs, bars, restaurants and nightclubs across the UK with the people in their photos — monetised through mobile premium billing. Launched before Facebook reached the UK.
Specialist VPS hosting service for Betfair exchange traders, with servers co-located in the same geographic region as Betfair's exchange infrastructure to minimise latency — combined with trading tool support and hands-on insight from a practising exchange trader.
Smart trading application for the Betfair exchange featuring a live ladder interface for visualising odds depth on individual runners, combined with configurable charting of technical indicators including short, medium, and long-term moving averages.
Interactive tools you can use right now — from a live Betfair order book heatmap built on real streaming data to architecture visualisers you can break and watch recover.
Live weather at every UK horse racing venue — current conditions, 7-day forecast, and an estimated going condition (F...
Upload a Betfair Starting Price CSV from the Historical Data Portal — analyse race results, BSP vs pre-play WAP drift...
Upload a Betfair historical streaming file — extract price history, matched volume, market timeline, and runner summa...
Watch the three pillars of observability — distributed traces, live Micrometer metrics, and structured MDC logs — upd...
Hardcoded config files and environment variables scattered across EC2 instances, ECS task definitions, and Lambda fun...
A poison pill is a message your consumer cannot process — bad schema, missing field, downstream service unavailable, ...
Every Betfair market has two layers of runner data: the catalogue layer that identifies who is running, and the marke...
H2 in-memory databases lie to you. They accept SQL that PostgreSQL rejects, silently ignore constraint violations tha...
“Engaged at a critical juncture mid-migration — Kafka idempotency patterns Samuel introduced turned out to be essential for safe reprocess...”
“Hit the ground running in a demanding trading environment, delivering robust, well-tested Java components under real pressure and earning...”
“Outstanding technical depth and genuine talent for collaboration — contributions to our real-time data ingestion platform were instrument...”
“Technical expertise and professionalism elevated the entire development process — deep knowledge of smart metering drove meaningful and m...”
Available for consultancy and contract work. If you are building systems where performance and correctness matter — trading platforms, data pipelines, high-throughput APIs — get in touch.