About

Work Experience

• CEO Uphold Labs, Uphold Inc.

  Aug, 2021 - Present

• Chief Operating Officer, OMG Network

  Aug, 2019 - Dec, 20201 year 4 months

• EVP Strategy, SYNQA

  May, 2018 - Dec, 20202 years 7 months

• Head of Blockchain R&D Strategy, Huawei Technologies

  Oct, 2017 - Apr, 20186 months

  The role at Huawei was as part of the group technology R&D organisation. We primarily worked on Hyperledger tooling where we successfully raised the Caliper project (https://www.hyperledger.org/projects/caliper) to TSC approval. I also had a wider remit to find opportunities to partner with startups, support due diligence and advise other business units as to the applicability, or not, of blockchain and DLT technologies.

• CTO, Rakuten

  Aug, 2016 - Oct, 20171 year 2 months

  The Rakuten Blockchain Lab was established following the sale of Bitnet Technologies IP to Rakuten. While growing the team in Belfast we worked closely with our Tokyo colleagues to better understand the current application needs and look for novel applications of blockchain technology. Conducted multiple projects building working prototypes of DLT based systems, including development of a sophisticated set of Bitcoin wallet services.

• CTO & Co-Founder, Bitnet Technologies Ltd.

  Jan, 2014 - Aug, 20162 years 7 months

  Bitnet was formed to disrupt the way enterprise merchants conduct commerce. Risk free, low cost cross border payments have long been a goal of the payments industry and with the emergence of Bitcoin and blockchain technology these challenges are radically simplified.

  As co-founder I am deeply involved in all aspects of the business; from initial formation and team development, product delivery, strategy, fund raising, Investor Relations and customer growth.

• Head of Technology / CTO, Visa / CyberSource

  Jul, 2011 - Jan, 20142 years 6 months

  Following the acquisition of CyberSource by Visa I worked closely with the Visa CTO office and enterprise architecture group on strategic alignment, system consolidation and platform integration into the Visa ecosystem. This required close cooperation on operational and security work as well as new product ideas and integration.

  A key goal was the establishment (recruiting externally and promoting internally) of the CyberSource technology team. The teams goal was the definition and delivery of a new technology strategy for the business. With successful stakeholder management we developed and delivered a meaningful new platform architecture, creation & delivery of a new set of developer APIs and significant investment in data analytics R&D.

  I also spent significant time supporting business development by providing external company diligence as part of an ongoing brief to identify opportunities for companies to invest in and/or acquire.

• Chief Software Engineer, CyberSource

  Aug, 2008 - Jul, 20112 years 11 months

  As chief engineer for the new CyberSource development centre my role was to recruit, train and lead the engineering group. The team brought new products to market within the first year and became subject matter experts on payments and e-commerce establishing themselves as some of the best technical talent within the company. We helped define and introduce more robust processes around development, testing and deployment.

• Principal Software Engineer, Liberty Mutual Insurance

  Sep, 2006 - Aug, 20081 year 11 months

  While at Liberty I worked on the Premium Innovation team whose role was the;

  • Development and deployment of Integration Architecture & Large System Application Architecture
  • Application of Agile and Lean techniques in an attempt to define solutions to difficult business problems
  • Design & develop strategic software solutions
  • Develop Open Source Software strategy, evangelism, and R&D

• Architect, Valista

  Jul, 2000 - Sep, 20066 years 2 months

  In 2003 I formally took responsibility for all architectural aspects of Valista's award winning payments product PaymentsPlus. This role included responsibility for the following;
  • Provide technical design leadership and review of all business requirements and functional specifications ensuring these meet the business needs and strategic objectives.
  • Produce detailed product design artefacts.
  • Lead implementation engineer with daily involvement in the coding, testing and debugging of the platform.
  • Work with Professional Services to understand how our customers use our products and incorporate their feedback into ongoing product evolution.
  • Working with Product Management on the product roadmap, collating and integrating key functional requirements into the plan, with consideration for both client and internal requirements.

• Director of Engineer, ApTest

  Dec, 1997 - Jun, 20002 years 6 months

  Specialists in automated software testing, California based, ApTest were keen to open a European headquarters. My role was to establish the company, build the team and deliver on projects won by ApTest Ireland. During this time I successfully managed the development and delivery of the OMG and OpenGroup sponsored CORBA test suites; VSOrb and VSJorb http://www.opengroup.org/vsorb.

• Principal Engineer, IONA Technologies

  Dec, 1995 - Dec, 19972 years

  As well as continuing my role as technical lead of the Orbix team, I took charge of the overall project management of the group. As the product grew in complexity and scope, together with a rapidly growing customer base, I helped foster and develop more formal development procedures within the team.

• Senior Software Engineer, IONA Technologies

  Dec, 1993 - Dec, 19952 years

  As technical lead of the core Orbix development group my main responsibility was the development and delivery of new product versions. I focused on the Orbix runtime components and the transport layer in particular. The main challenge was to maintain a single C++ source code base that worked across an large set of operating systems. An additional challenge was tracking the ever growing core set of OMG specifications.

Skills

Education

References