Open to Head of / Director of Engineering roles · remote

Rob King Engineering Manager · Platform & Software Engineering Leader

Hands-on engineering manager with 25 years of experience leading and growing high-performing software teams. I currently manage a platform engineering team (junior to staff level) at a high-growth hospitality SaaS company, owning team delivery, the roadmap, hiring, coaching and day-to-day execution. Strong technical foundation in C#, .NET, Azure, event-driven microservices and AI-native engineering practices, which keeps me close to the work and trusted by my engineers.

Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK [email protected] Available for remote work
25yrs
Building software and teams
€1.5M
Value delivered in one review period
90%
Hosting cost cut on a platform rebuild
20+
Engineers led as technical lead
Selected impact

Outcomes I am proud of.

A few moments that show how I think about cost, risk and the long-term health of a platform.

AI-native

A platform built for agents

I redesigned the internal developer platform with AI agents as first-class consumers: machine-readable catalogues and contracts, guardrailed provisioning patterns with Claude Code and MCP, and internal skills now used across the organisation.

75% faster

Performance and standards

Led stored-procedure enablement that improved query performance by over 75% in early adopters, and rolled out R&D-wide engineering guardrails that raised the craft bar across every team.

~€1.5M

Commercial ownership

In a single review period: a 3-year Microsoft reservation (around €1M saved), a central database downscale (€120K/year), and an eventing migration from Kafka to Azure Event Hubs that swapped an uncapped €300K cost for a hard-capped €50K.

128 → 80

Crisis leadership under load

When CPU hit the 128-core ceiling of Microsoft's largest tier and threatened a platform-wide outage, I led the response with the Chief Architect, coordinated staff engineers across the business and brought the database back to 80 cores, extending its operational life.

Experience

Where I have done the work.

Mews Dec 2024 to now Hospitality SaaS

Engineering Manager, Platform

Team leadership · platform strategy · hands-on delivery
  • Lead a platform engineering team from junior to staff level, owning the roadmap, people management, business analysis and customer adoption.
  • Author and owner of the platform product strategy: vision, roadmap, north-star metric and outcome hypotheses, shipped as end-to-end slices every few weeks.
  • Senior technical voice on the move to event-driven architecture, decomposing the monolith into microservices and contributing to the sharding programme.
  • Redesigned the team operating model around owning domains, and ran Git workshops for non-technical staff across the company.
Smart Matched Betting Sep 2017 to now

Chief Technology Officer

Full platform ownership · startup
  • Built and own the entire platform: .NET microservices on Azure with Service Bus, SignalR, NodeJS and CosmosDB, and a Blazor front end.
  • Moved from a monolith to event-driven microservices with MassTransit, improving performance and cutting hosting costs by 90%.
  • Implemented CQRS for high-performance reads, full CI/CD, and integrations across Betfair Exchange, Stripe, Twilio and Auth0.
Markerstudy Insurance Jul 2019 to Nov 2024

Technical Lead

Broker websites for Co-Op, Lloyds, M&S, Santander, RAC
  • Led large projects including new brand builds and 3D-Secure payment integrations with Barclaycard.
  • Owned the CI/CD pipeline as subject-matter expert, and championed Blazor and Azure adoption across the team.
  • Embedded engineering best practice, ran workshops and mentored the team.
Bede Gaming Apr 2015 to Jul 2019

Solutions Architect / Technical Lead

Regulated platforms · 20+ engineers
  • Prepared the platform for Spanish regulation and led a new gambling and lottery platform for the Canadian government.
  • Led 20+ developers on the architecture of Bede's Orchard CMS solution, owning standards, estimates and incident resolution.
  • Invited by Microsoft to speak in New York on scaling Orchard CMS for high-capacity web applications.
Earlier roles 2002 to 2015

Lead Software Engineer, then Software Engineer

Lowes Financial Management · IRIS Payroll Solutions
  • A decade leading delivery at Lowes Financial Management, after starting out building payroll software at IRIS.
  • The foundation: shipping real systems, learning the craft, and earning the right to lead.
Toolkit

What I build with.

Deep in the Microsoft and Azure ecosystem, with a strong pull toward event-driven systems and AI-native engineering.

Leadership
People management Coaching & career growth Hiring & onboarding Operating-model design Product strategy & roadmap Budget ownership Stakeholder management
Engineering
C# .NET Azure Event-driven architecture Microservices Kafka MassTransit Azure Event Hubs CQRS REST APIs Blazor SQL Server Database sharding CI/CD Docker Payments (Stripe, Barclaycard, 3DS) OAuth / Auth0
AI-native engineering
AI agents Claude Code Model Context Protocol (MCP) Agentic developer platforms Guardrailed AI provisioning Internal AI tooling
What it is like to work with me

How I work with a team.

These have held steady across every team I have run.

Clear and direct

Clear context, straight feedback, and decisions people can actually follow. No jargon for the sake of it.

Real ownership

I give people genuine ownership of their work and back them when it counts. Autonomy is how good engineers stay.

Calm in a crisis

When something is on fire, I coordinate, prioritise and keep people steady. I have led the response when a platform was hours from failing.

Ship in small steps

Value delivered every few weeks beats a big plan that never lands. I keep teams moving.

Education

BSc (Hons) Computer Science

Diploma in Financial Planning

Certifications

Microsoft Certified across Azure AI Fundamentals, Azure Developer, Azure Fundamentals, C#, ASP.NET, WCF, WPF, .NET Data Access and Microsoft SQL Server.

Let's talk

If you have an engineering team to lead, let's talk.

Open to Head of Engineering, Director of Engineering and Engineering Manager roles. Remote.