I lead engineering teams building discovery, search, and personalisation at Epic Games — the layer that decides what hundreds of millions of players see when they open Fortnite or browse the Epic Games Store.
My default on leadership is servant: clear the blockers, make the direction legible, hold the line on standards. I borrow as much from football managers — Klopp, Guardiola — as from engineering management books, while being clear-eyed that the two games aren’t the same. Useful beats inspiring. Trust is earned before belief is asked for.
Before Epic I ran Game Services at Mediatonic for Fall Guys, server engineering at NaturalMotion for Star Wars: Hunters and Dawn of Titans, and was CTO at a London startup. Twenty-plus years, always somewhere in the mix between systems at load and the teams building them.
Based in London. Recently finished an MSc in Computer Science (Distinction) at the University of Bath.
Helping engineering orgs get from “it works” to “it scales” — technically and organisationally.
01 / system
Backend architecture under real load. Load-testing to 25M concurrent, migrating core infrastructure to managed services, squeezing 10× performance and meaningful cost out of AWS — the engineering specifics of surviving a popularity spike without rewriting the world.
02 / org
Hiring plans, levelling frameworks, promotion pipelines — and the quieter work of coaching individual engineers toward senior and principal. I lead servant-style: remove blockers, make direction legible, hold the line on standards. I’ve grown and restructured engineering teams across four studios.
03 / bridge
Tech strategy that connects back to business outcomes — so the roadmap is defensible to product, finance, and the CEO, not just to engineers. Often the most useful help is translation.
Dec 2024 — Now
Engineering strategy and delivery for Fortnite and Epic Games Store discovery, search, and personalisation. Driving initiatives for fair, unbiased discovery across the player ecosystem.
Apr 2023 — Dec 2024
Ran Fortnite Game Services (Discovery) across multiple time zones. Oversaw the launch of Discovery Search load-tested to 25M CCU, and delivered personalisation and recommendations to the same audience. Migrated the OpenSearch cluster to a managed service — 10× performance gain alongside a meaningful AWS cost reduction. Grew the team through deliberate hiring, coaching, and headcount planning.
Nov 2021 — Apr 2023
Led an 8-engineer Game Services team through the Fall Guys Free-to-Play launch (June 2022). Established levelling frameworks for ICs and managers; mentored and promoted engineers into senior and principal roles; supported UEFN and wider Epic strategic work.
Jan 2018 — Nov 2021
Server engineering for Dawn of Titans, Star Wars: Commander, and Star Wars: Hunters (Nintendo Switch). Championed migration of Dawn of Titans to EKS; oversaw the handover of Star Wars: Commander from Disney to NaturalMotion. Presented server tech for an unannounced Star Wars title to the Zynga CTO — greenlit to pre-production. Grew team capability while running multiple live titles.
Nov 2015 — Jan 2018
Central technology microservices for Dawn of Titans and CSR Racing 2. Rebuilt identity integration for reliability at scale. Coordinated the Dawn of Titans hard launch with AWS, including ELB pre-warming.
Jan 2014 — Oct 2015
Brought all development in-house at a London startup. Built iOS and Android apps and the RESTful APIs behind them. Led technical strategy, product UX, and acquisition campaigns.
2004 — 2013
Technical Consultant at Pocket Media. Commercial Director then Head of Marketing at MOKO Social Media. Senior Technical Developer at American Mobile Ventures. Senior Web Developer at CentralNic. Founder of GNSiva Consultancy.
Oversaw the launch of search inside Fortnite, load-tested to 25 million concurrent users. Migrated the OpenSearch cluster to a managed service — 10× performance gain while reducing AWS spend.
Engineering manager for the 8-person Game Services team that delivered the Fall Guys F2P transition in June 2022. Grew the team and tightened live-service resilience ahead of the launch surge.
Championed migration of Dawn of Titans to EKS — modernising infrastructure, CI/CD, and operational consistency for a live mobile title with an established player base.
Presented the server architecture proposal to the Zynga CTO and secured greenlight to pre-production.
I take on a small number of advisory and fractional CTO engagements each year alongside my day job — usually with engineering leaders working through scaling moments, either in the system or the org around it.
If that sounds like where you are, the best way to start is an email.