I find out what a team needs.
Then I build it with them.
Available now · contract or full-time · London or remote UK
Operations lead, nine years. Started in finance, moved towards the rest of the business.
I trained as an accountant and spent five years in insurance, investment accounting and risk. What kept pulling me away from the ledger was everyone else’s problem: legal stuck on onboarding, a people team with no hiring pipeline, engineers who needed someone to own the unglamorous parts.
I found I liked that connective work more than the numbers and followed it, through Parity, the Starknet Foundation and now Chainlabs. Payout rails, hiring pipelines, treasury controls, a compliance framework legal signed off on, the bot a 43-person network runs on.
Somewhere along the way I stopped writing specs for other people to build and started building them myself, mostly because waiting was slower. That is how I ended up shipping the payout pipeline and the reconciliation behind it, reviewed by the engineers who know the stack better than I do.
- The shape of the role
- Operations, Business Operations, Customer Success, Solutions and Implementation, Partnerships, Forward Deployed and Implementation Engineering, Payments and Platform EngineeringThe shape of the work, not the job title
- Where I add most
- Between the customer and the engineersWeekly with seven client accounts in blockchain intelligence, security and exchange compliance
- Level
- Senior / Manager / LeadLeads a team of 4 and a network of 43 · Google Apps Script, Python, Node, Postgres · BSc Accounting & Finance · part-CIMA · PRINCE2 · AgilePM
- Working style
- Hybrid preferredIn the room for the big weeks; heads-down remote when the work needs it
- Right to work
- British citizenUnrestricted UK & Ireland; no sponsorship needed
- Availability
- Looking for the next opportunityOn a rolling contract · open to contract or full-time
Builds
Things I helped build that are still running. Drag the ring or use the arrows; click the front card for the story.
Inside the builds
Six layers per build, foundation first. Click a layer to read what it is made of, who built it with me, and what it cost.
How I work
A loop, not a ladder. PRINCE2 and AgilePM gave me the vocabulary; nine years of things not going to plan gave me the habit.
Listen
Sit with the team that has the problem, not the ticket. Most of the answer is already in the room; my job is to hear it.
Audit
Trace what really happens today, end to end, before changing anything. The accountant in me insists.
Ask the right question
The problem as stated is rarely the problem. One good question, asked respectfully, saves a month of building the wrong thing.
Build fast
The smallest version people can use tomorrow, in the tools they already live in. Then own the metric, weekly.
Kill fast, iterate
If it has not earned its place in a week, it goes. Keep what works, say plainly what did not, go round again.
Built with other people.
Credited that way.
The best things on this page were built with other people, and I would rather credit the team than pretend otherwise. I ship production code through the same reviewed PR workflow as the rest of the team, and where someone knows a system better than I do, I ask them.
Teams I've built operations with
Every role has had the same shape: another team has a process problem, we work out the real question together, and I build the fix with them and hand it back running.
Finance
- Built the payout pipeline paying a 43-person network with the engineering team, and the fee tracker reconciling on-chain and exchange fees per token across nine block-explorer APIs, with a three-source historical pricing cascade.
- Supported $100M+ across Safe multisigs; managed $300K in donations; coordinated OTC and custodian flows.
- Centralised 150+ subscriptions (~£3M) into one system for cost and vendor control.
- Introduced cost-versus-output tracking so the vertical's margin is visible; moved parts of the network to per-unit pricing.
Legal
- Designed the Starknet Foundation's first AML/KYB framework with Sumsub automation. Legal set the bar; we built the operational layer to meet it.
- Aligned compliance, legal and finance requirements across US, UK and EU.
- LLM-based quality checks on contract summaries and documentation.
- Grant contracting for 500+ teams: review, milestones, payment, audit trail.
People
- Run the hiring pipeline across 25+ countries; wrote the screening assessment the vertical hires against.
- Carry People Operations alongside the vertical at Chainlabs.
- Rebuilt onboarding and offboarding SOPs at Parity, aligning HR and IT.
- Ran a recruitment desk in Berlin, so the sourcing-to-close loop is not new territory.
Security
- Ran operational delivery of Parity's Bug Bounty Program: compliant payouts in fiat and DOT, approvals, audit-ready documentation.
- Set the evidence-retention rule so supporting evidence survives a contributor deleting their files.
- Built self-monitoring and alerting: a database outage pages someone rather than going unnoticed.
- Crypto custody addresses and withdrawal-aging digests on the payment rails.
Engineering
- 190+ PRs on the production repo through a reviewed workflow, each one reviewed by an engineer who knows more than I do; 8,361 contributions in the past year.
- Supabase/Postgres data layer, Node backend, and the migration off Google Apps Script.
- Built REX Bot, the Telegram and Slack bot the network runs on, AI Q&A with guardrails, routing, chase notices, five webhooks from the sheets.
- Own the classification taxonomy and data-quality standard the client tools depend on downstream.
DevRel and ecosystem
- DevRel support: ran and judged hackathons, competed in them too (ETHGlobal Lisbon 2026 as a builder), onboarded developers and kept ambassador programmes moving.
- Grant operations for 500+ teams: programmes still running today.
- Polkadot Developer Heroes: onboarded 100+ developers; global merchandise and event logistics.
- Hackathons, developer programmes, meetups and ambassador initiatives at Starknet.
- Own client relationships for the Chainlabs vertical: seven clients, weekly.
Experience
Nine years, financial services into crypto. Why each role ended is stated; none were performance.
Chainlabs (Lunar Rails) · Regional Operations Team Lead
- Own end-to-end operations, customer success and client delivery for the Regional Exchanges vertical; lead a team of 4, three client delivery leads and an operations generalist, plus a contributor network of 43 across 25+ countries.
- Own the relationships and delivery cadence with seven client accounts, weekly: sprint briefs, escalations, and the follow-through. An early volume complaint became steady over-delivery.
- Own the vertical's delivery metric end to end. We run 35 to 50% above the contracted monthly minimum; August 2026 closed at ~275 entities against a 200 floor, 1,200+ traces.
- Built the payout pipeline, REX Bot, fee tracker, monitoring and internal console with the engineering team, iterating weekly against what the network actually needed.
- Chair the weekly delivery meeting; run 1:1s with team leads; own client leadership as category owner, including the classification taxonomy calls that decide how an entity is categorised so the labels hold up downstream.
- Ship production code through a reviewed PR workflow: a Supabase/Postgres data layer, a Node backend, and the migration off Google Apps Script. 190+ PRs on the vertical's repo; 8,361 GitHub contributions in the year.
- Built the crypto payment rails around the payout pipeline: custody addresses, invoice metadata, withdrawal-ageing digests and the reconciliation behind them. Built the automated fee tracker that recovers missing on-chain fee and date data straight from block-explorer APIs across every contractor and client sheet.
- Own data-quality control for the vertical's output, the evidence standard the client compliance tools depend on downstream. Set the evidence-retention rule so supporting evidence survives a contributor deleting their own files.
- Carry People Operations alongside the vertical: the hiring pipeline across 25+ countries, the screening assessment researchers are hired against, and cost-versus-output tracking that made the vertical's margin visible and moved parts of the network to per-unit pricing.
Starknet Foundation · Operations Manager
- Joined at launch to build the grants programmes. Onboarded over 500 teams, from seed-stage one-developer projects to established organisations, through grants and technical advice. My part was operational: contract management, finance distribution, and connecting teams with the right stakeholders and tools. The programmes are still running.
- Worked with Finance and Legal on treasury operations of more than $100M across Safe multisigs and Starknet-native wallets; managed $300K in donations.
- Designed the Foundation's first AML/KYB framework and integrated Sumsub behind it for compliant onboarding at scale. Aligned compliance, legal and finance requirements across US, UK and EU; Legal set the bar, we built the operational layer to meet it.
- Cut onboarding and reporting cycle times by 33% through Notion and Airtable process work. Built grant KPIs and OKRs so delivery accuracy and executive visibility improved together.
- Coordinated exchange listings, OTC flows and custodian partnerships; ensured accurate execution, reconciliation and tracking across multi-currency flows.
- Supported hundreds of teams on funding, reporting and compliance readiness; coordinated hackathons, developer programmes, meetups and ambassador initiatives. Applied LLM-based quality checks to contract summaries and compliance documentation.
Parity Technologies (Polkadot) · Operations Project Manager
- Managed the Bug Bounty Program: compliant payouts in fiat and DOT with reconciliations and audit-ready documentation.
- Centralised 150+ subscriptions (~£3M) into Asana; led the Asana migration from Airtable across teams.
- Supported the UK office expansion: procurement, vendors, documentation. Developer Heroes: 100+ developers onboarded.
- Promoted from Operations Coordinator to Operations Project Manager in January 2023. Supported operations, finance, legal and people teams with cross-functional coordination; rebuilt onboarding and offboarding through clearer SOPs and HR/IT alignment.
- Managed global merchandise and event logistics across the Polkadot ecosystem.
The Shipowners' Club · Operations
- Coordinated 170+ global vessel inspections with surveyors, brokers and underwriters.
- Operational reporting and analysis supporting risk and underwriting decisions; contributed to the first CSR report.
Phaidon International · Recruitment Consultant
- End-to-end recruitment for financial-sector clients: sourcing, screening, closing.
Finance foundation · Canada Life · OMD EMEA · GE Capital
- Canada Life: Trainee Investment Accountant: reconciliations and audit papers for European portfolios.
- OMD EMEA: Finance Executive: international client finances and cost reporting.
- GE Capital: Risk Management placement: credit risk underwriting and compliance databases across EMEA.
- This is where the controls and reconciliation habits come from, and why a $100M treasury and a payout pipeline are the same problem to me.
Founder and consultant · ecommerce, chain.giving, Opsuma; Revion, Twende 27, ABI
- Own ecommerce brands run end to end: product research, Shopify builds, suppliers, fulfilment, SEO, TikTok and Meta ads.
- Operations consultant to Revion Oil (go-to-market agent system), Twende 27 (AFCON 2027 hospitality) and ABI (a grain handling and storage facility in Uganda: vendor offers, insurance, environmental reporting).
Who the work is for
Clients, ecosystem counterparties and employers across nine years.
Seven industry-leading firms, in blockchain intelligence, on-chain security monitoring and a top-tier exchange, rely on this vertical's output. I hold the relationships and the delivery cadence with them weekly.
Grant operations for 500+ teams, treasury on Safe multisigs, KYB on Sumsub, and daily work with Ethereum and the ecosystem's core builders.
Where the nine years were spent: Layer-1 and Layer-2 organisations, marine insurance, investment management, media finance and industrial lending.
Tools I work in
The everyday stack, and the AI layer on top of it. Hover a group to bring it forward.
Led the Asana migration off Airtable across teams at Parity. Notion and Airtable process work cut onboarding and reporting cycle times by 33% at Starknet. The Chainlabs network of 43 lives in Telegram; Twende's team runs on a Notion Command Center.
Advanced Excel and Sheets from four years of investment accounting and underwriting reporting. Safe multisig on $100M+; Sumsub wired into the AML/KYB framework; KPI dashboards for grants and delivery.
190+ PRs on the production repo through a reviewed workflow; 8,361 contributions in the past year. Not a career engineer. An operator who ships production code with the engineering team and learns in the open.
A working method rather than a tool list. 40 agents in production across two businesses, 22 QC agents on the Chainlabs repo, 18 running Revion's go-to-market. LLM pipelines for contract summaries, QA and reporting; Perplexity and Gemini for research, Cursor and Codex for the build, Claude Code as the operating layer.
Capabilities
- FinOps & treasury
- Payouts and payment rails, multi-chain fee reconciliation with historical pricing, multi-currency reconciliation, Safe multisig operations, controls and reporting, cost-versus-output tracking, vendor and subscription management, exchange listings, OTC, custodian partnerships.
- Cross-functional ops
- Building the operating layer for legal, people, security, engineering and marketing: SOPs, tooling, KPIs and OKRs, influence without direct authority, and handing it back running.
- Client & customer facing
- Weekly with seven client accounts. I learn each client's priorities and risk profile, turn them into a delivery plan, and own the outcome. At Starknet, onboarded over 500 teams, from seed-stage one-developer projects to established organisations, through grants and technical advice. My part was operational: contract management, finance distribution, and connecting teams with the right stakeholders and tools.
- Solutions & implementation
- Taking a customer's problem and standing up the system that solves it, integrations, onboarding flows, migrations (Apps Script to Postgres, Airtable to Asana), and the documentation that keeps it running after handover.
- Engineering
- Python, Node, Supabase/Postgres, Google Apps Script, REST APIs, Telegram bot development, crypto payment rails, multi-chain fee reconciliation, monitoring and alerting, reviewed PR workflow, shipped alongside the engineering team.
- AI operator
- Subagents and Slack agents in daily use, agentic workflows across several LLM providers, LLM pipelines for QA, documentation and reporting. 40 agents in production across two businesses.
- Programme delivery
- PRINCE2, AgilePM, milestones, risk and dependency tracking, grants at scale.
- DevRel & ecosystem
- Hackathons run, judged and entered; developer onboarding (100+ at Polkadot); ambassador and meetup programmes; the operational side of an ecosystem that builders actually feel.
- Leadership
- Line-managing a team of 4, three client delivery leads and an operations generalist, plus a 43-person contributor network; hiring across 25+ countries; client relationships.
- Regulatory-adjacent
- AML/KYB framework design, Sumsub, MiCA and the EU Travel Rule, built as operations, with legal for sign-off. Not a compliance officer and not a lawyer.
- Lighter on
- Solidity (can read it, will pair on it), frontend, and I am not a career engineer. Stated plainly; I would rather you know where I will need a hand.
Off the clock
The parts that do not fit on a CV but explain a lot.
I have a dog, which settles the shape of most mornings. Training and general wellbeing keep the rest of the day honest, and I am always working on something I am not good at yet. Sport I watch as closely as I play it. Travel taught me that every place runs on a different process and every one of them makes sense once you sit with the people. Music is on most of the time. Family and friends are the point of the whole thing.
Send me your messiest process.
Within 48 hours you will have the three questions I would ask first and what I would build in week one. No deck, no pitch, one page. It is how I work, and the fairest way for both of us to find out whether we would work well together. If I am wrong about your problem, you have lost nothing but an email.
Not one prompt. One working session on top of months of groundwork: a single source of truth for every claim, a written brief and operating rules for the AI, an agent library already in production, and the same QA passes I run on any build: requirements check, fact audit against records, copy review, accessibility and performance checks, then deploy verification against the live endpoint. Hover a node.
The same loop as above. I set the brief, audited every claim against my own records, and removed what did not earn its place. Not to show that AI can build a CV, but to show how I run a build.