I joined Palantir in 2016 as a forward deployed engineer and left as an engineering group lead. In between, I worked directly with customers on their hardest data problems, led a joint programme with Airbus, built the cloud infrastructure that Palantir's software runs on, and finally ran the engineering group behind Apollo, the platform that deploys and operates everything Palantir ships.
This page is where I write about that work, about what I've learned leading engineering teams, and about what I'm thinking about now.
About me
Ten years of shipping software into hard places
Most of my career has been about one problem: getting complex software to run reliably in environments that were never designed for it. Airline maintenance hangars, government networks with no internet connection, customer data centres, every major public cloud. The technology changes, but the problem doesn't.
I started on the engineering side of the hardware world, validating production silicon at Apple. Then I moved to Palantir, where I spent a decade going from the field, sitting with customers and solving their problems on their systems, all the way to leading the group that owns how Palantir's software reaches every customer at once.
I care about teams that own outcomes rather than tickets, about infrastructure that is boring in the best possible way, and about engineers who understand what the software is actually for.
Palantir TechnologiesSep 2021 – 2026London
Leading the engineering group for Apollo
My last role at Palantir was leading the engineering group for Apollo. Apollo is Palantir's continuous delivery platform. It takes every piece of software Palantir builds and deploys, upgrades and operates it across hundreds of environments: public cloud, customer on-premise installations, and classified networks that are fully disconnected from the internet.
It is the layer that makes the rest of Palantir possible. When Foundry or Gotham ships a new version, Apollo is what gets it safely to every customer. Leading that group meant thinking about reliability at a scale where a mistake is not one outage but hundreds, and building a team that could carry that responsibility.
Palantir TechnologiesMay 2020 – Aug 2021London
Cloud infrastructure for Palantir's deployments
Before Apollo, I led the group responsible for the cloud infrastructure that Palantir's software solutions are deployed on. This was the ground floor: the compute, networking and platform layer that every customer environment sat on top of. It was where I moved from leading projects to leading engineering, and where I learned how much of a product's reliability is decided long before any feature is written.
Palantir TechnologiesJul 2017 – May 2020United Kingdom
Skywise, with Airbus
For almost three years I was project lead on Skywise, the aviation data platform built as a partnership between Airbus and Palantir. Skywise brought airlines, suppliers and Airbus itself onto one platform, so that the whole value chain could share and analyse operational data: aircraft health, maintenance, flight operations, supply chain.
It was one of the largest data partnerships in the industry, and it taught me what it takes to build a product that competitors will agree to share data on. Most of that is trust, and trust is mostly engineering.
Palantir TechnologiesAug 2016 – May 2020London
Forward deployed engineer
This is where I started at Palantir. Forward deployed engineers work on site with customers, on their data, on their problems, with a mandate to get to an outcome rather than to deliver a spec. You learn quickly that the hard part is rarely the code. It's understanding what the organisation actually needs and building something they will use.
Everything I did later was shaped by those years. I still think the best platform engineers are the ones who have been on the receiving end of a bad deployment.
AppleSep 2014 – Jun 2016
Post-silicon validation engineer
My first role out of university was at Apple, validating production silicon. It was a different discipline entirely, with different tools and a different pace, but it gave me a lasting respect for rigour and for testing things properly before they reach a customer.
Now
What I'm doing next
I've recently left Palantir after ten years. I'm taking the time to think about what to build next, and I'll be writing here about engineering leadership, deployment and infrastructure, and the things I wish someone had told me earlier.
If you'd like to talk, the best places to find me are below.
