Chris Anthony
Engineering Lead
A hands-on Engineering Lead with 20 years' expertise in modern web technologies, specialised in guiding globally distributed engineering teams to deliver best-in-class digital transformations across 7+ sectors including spirits, media, financial services, and e-commerce. Having led transformations for global brands like Diageo, The Times, Sky, and Lloyds Banking Group, I bring proven expertise in scaling platforms that serve millions of users. With a strong passion for AI, I have built a RAG system to revolutionise the ticketing sector in my spare time and am currently developing a Computer Vision system to help farmers in the AgTech space.
Diageo
• Principal Engineer → Tech Lead → Engineering Lead- Initiated and led the development of the company's global headless platform, co-creating the composable architecture vision that now powers over 75% of Diageo traffic for brands including Johnnie Walker, Guinness, Smirnoff, and Baileys.
- Implemented global headless CMS platform, reducing time-to-market by 40%, achieving 100% compliance across legal and compliance standards as well as achieving significant annual development savings.
- Established 'Bedrock', a foundational TypeScript mono-repo (8 applications, 22+ packages, 5 Contentful extensions) as the cornerstone for code reuse and developer productivity across multiple teams and agencies.
- Pioneered major infrastructure transformation, designing and implementing a scalable composable architecture that consolidated dispersed technologies onto a single SaaS-only stack (Contentful, Vercel, Algolia, Auth0).
- Defined comprehensive platform governance including 15 Quality Attribute Requirements, documented best practices, automated technical assessment, and a suite of automated quality gates.
- Rapidly scaled a global engineering team to 40+ internal developers, selected and onboarded multiple external agencies, creating a supportive environment that empowered innovation and growth.
- Led multiple initiatives to embrace AI adoption, introducing Generative AI to expedite migrations, improve quality, and remove inefficiencies across the department.
- Organised regular team-wide hackathons and fostered an innovation culture, while providing technical leadership for several parallel, complex website migrations with groundbreaking performance results.
The Times
• Software EngineerDrove front-end development for digital transformation initiative, specialising in web performance optimisation and modern development practices.
The Very Group
• Principal Software EngineerFocused on delivering a highly available, scalable enterprise solution to transform and replace their existing Digital Customer Experience, playing a key role in building their new digital commerce platform.
Sky
• React DeveloperDeveloped new features for node/react mono-repo website with strong relationship to the design team, creating bespoke React components bound together via Adobe Spectrum design system for use across multiple teams and channels.
Fresh Deals LTD
• FounderFounded a serverless progressive web app during the coronavirus pandemic, creating a comprehensive solution using modern technologies and best practices.
Lloyds Banking Group
• Lead DeveloperLocated in the Financial Planning and Retirement lab, assisted digital transformation and surfacing of pension information to 15 Million users across Halifax, Bank of Scotland and Lloyds brands, supporting the board's IT strategy by improving app performance and ensuring maximum customer growth.
The Virtual Assistant Ninja
• FounderDesigned, architected, and developed a suite of SaaS products supporting over a thousand online retailers. The platform consisted of three separate products and eight distributed micro-services worldwide, successfully acquired by Hustle Got Real LTD in March 2020.
Bet365
• Software DeveloperResponsible for Client Side development of the Sports UI across all platforms and countries for the world's largest online gambling operator. Developed multiple new feature projects while participating in the re-write of the legacy site to its HTML5 successor, including mentoring other developers, issue diagnostics and performance improvements.
Tombola LTD
• Client Developer → Senior Client Developer → Client Development LeadTombola is the #1 Bingo Operator in the UK, Spain and Italy. I designed and developed many products for both consumer and business use targeted to a range of platforms, but specialising in mobile development. The products I created had a daily user base upwards of 50k. As well as day to day development and management of core desktop & mobile products, my other responsibilities as team lead included:
- Leadership of 13 skilled client developers
- Co-ordination and allocation of tasks via scrum meetings
- Championing standards to ensure all internal policies and procedures were adhered to
- Ensuring agreed timelines and project deliverables were met
- Tracking project progress and presenting progress and risks/issues at regular meetings
- Problem management and incident resolution
- Mentorship & training as and when needed
- Ad-hoc on-call to support team should an incident occur which requires specialist knowledge
- Staff recruitment & appraisals
TH_NK
• Javascript DeveloperContributed to various JavaScript-based projects and developed and maintained client-side web applications.