My CV

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Terry Brown

Senior Director of Engineering with 25+ years leading engineering organisations across healthcare, pharma, gaming, and hospitality SaaS. I work at the intersection of platform engineering, security, and people leadership - building the technical foundations businesses need to scale, while creating the environments in which engineers and leaders produce the best work of their careers. I’ve led through rapid growth, M&A integration, major security incidents, EMI licensing, and IPO preparation, bringing the same conviction to each: that psychological safety and high accountability are complements, not trade-offs. Outside my direct line I’m an active speaker on psychological safety and engineering culture, and a coach and mentor to individuals across and beyond my organisations. I care deeply about mental health, LGBT+ inclusion, and women in tech, and try to be an active public ally within these spaces.

Experience

Senior Director of Engineering - Mews Sep 2023 - Present
Leading the Platform & Security Engineering (P&SE) tribe at Mews, a fast-scaling hospitality SaaS company. Responsible for platform engineering, security operations, cloud infrastructure and compliance, whilst driving engineering organisation maturity across R&D more broadly.

Financial & Commercial Impact

• Delivered over €2M in cumulative annualised savings across the Platform division (~€1M in 2025, ~€1.4M+ in 2026 YTD) - through cloud cost optimisation, security tooling consolidation (Wiz, ~€342k/year), observability migration (New Relic → Coralogix, ~€744k/year), Splunk/Sentinel consolidation, and Confluent Cloud consolidation. Also negotiated a complex Microsoft EA contract mitigating significant platform stability risk.
• Full P&L ownership of the P&SE division - managing an annual €10m opex budget and €4m headcount budget, with monthly reporting to Finance and R&D leadership and cost-consciousness embedded as a cultural standard across the tribe.

Security & Compliance

• Led Mews' response to the largest and longest phishing attack in company history, coordinating internally across Product Security, Platform, and customer-facing teams whilst managing high-stakes external customer communications with professionalism and calm. Proactively secured resources for threat modelling and defence-in-depth investments, and drove on-call structure improvements across Product Security.
• Built Mews' Security Operations capability from the ground up - identified the capability gap, hired an Engineering Manager and IC team, and stood up SIEM, Case Management, and Threat Intelligence platforms. Conducted a comprehensive Wiz security audit surfacing critical vulnerabilities and achieved "Zero Criticals" - reducing 86 critical toxic findings to zero within a month. Rebuilt the security team through significant attrition (7 → 3 → stronger team of 7) within six months.
• Key driver of EMI, DORA and financial services compliance - authored multiple compliance procedures, led EMI resilience activities (network isolation/segmentation, capacity management), produced the EMI Compliance Gap Analysis with quantified gaps and target dates, and proactively shaped a DORA-inspired regulatory roadmap. Contributed to Series D, SOX, and SOC2/ISO27001/PCI-DSS roadmap alignment.

Platform & Technical Leadership

• Led the Atlas developer platform to significant maturity and scale, growing from 10 services in production to 40+, with self-service infrastructure provisioning reduced from days to under 10 minutes. Engaged product engineering teams to drive simultaneous platform maturation and adoption, described by management as "critical to the scalability of Mews."
• Made the strategic call to migrate from Pulumi to Terraform, reversing 18 months of prior investment when it became clear the tooling was creating business risk and impeding the ability to move quickly - leading the team through the change with urgency and reassurance.
• Drove Mews' observability transformation, orchestrating a rapid POC and migration from New Relic to Coralogix, whilst standing up an Observability Champions programme to embed cultural adoption of modern observability practices across R&D.
• Automated GitHub access and onboarding end-to-end via SSO - eliminating a fully manual process that generated ~250 requests per year with an average 35-hour wait time, saving engineers approximately 8,700 hours of wait time annually.
• Authored the Atlas Agentic Platform vision - a forward-looking strategy to make Atlas the platform that AI agents build on and help operate, with pillars covering agentic developer experience, AI SRE agents for autonomous incident investigation, and an infrastructure knowledge graph connecting Port.io, Coralogix, Terraform state, and Wiz.

People, Culture & Organisation

• Primary author of the R&D Career Framework for ICs and Managers, and a key driver of wider engineering organisation maturity - proposing and driving a company-wide on-call model ("you build it, you run it") and refining the Staff Engineer career framework with a new "Solver" track to enable senior engineering growth beyond an architect role.
• Hired, grew, and scaled the P&SE tribe - building new teams, replacing critical leadership roles, hiring excellent engineering managers, and designing a future security organisational structure to support growth to and beyond IPO. Maintained one of the most effective hiring pipelines at Mews, introducing Loom video outreach, structured interview scripts, and a consistently high-quality candidate experience.
• Led platform and security integration for multiple M&A activities, serving as key stakeholder for multiple acquisitions, including onsite security posture remediation visits and building durable M&A capability through a structured shadowing approach.
• Built a strong coaching and people leadership culture across P&SE and broader R&D - conducting 20+ skip-levels, introducing the Balint method for group coaching, and coaching individuals well beyond the direct reporting line. Tribe engagement scores reached 8.4, with Management Support (9.5), Meaningful Work (9.5), and Freedom of Opinions (9.2). Won the Mews annual award for "Never Underestimate the Importance of Humour."
• Served as Acting VP of Engineering during an extended period of VP paternity leave - taking on full P&SE and broader R&D leadership responsibilities. Led the Platform Enablement 2026 strategy, coordinating across four tribes and introducing a "platform as product" mindset with customer proximity and co-creation focus.

Head of Engineering - Doccla Jan 2023 - Sep 2023
Supporting strong commercial growth, I was hired to scale and mature the tech organisation and bring about a culture of technical excellence.

• Drove improvement, adoption, and internal ownership of all code providing business value which had primarily been provided by external partners, reducing ownership costs and improving quality significantly
• Co-creation and delivery of both a product strategy and cloud strategy to align digital product delivery to company strategy and goals
• Built and delivered a hiring strategy, and doubled the size of the tech org, including the creation of a Cloud Platform and Data teams
• Improved many processes, including hiring, onboarding and OKRs, introducing a single pane of glass company wide for group and team OKRs. Also delivered process improvement around quality, introducing processes such as RFC and ADR.
• Improved knowledge management, creating a technical library leading to improved quality and visibility of Technical, Security and Compliance information
• Redesigned the tech org around value streams, aligning cross functional teams to Patient, Clinical, and Operational Excellence and provide empowerment, autonomy and ownership within the squads
• Delivery and lead of adoption of ISO 27001, going from zero to fully certified in 5 months, achieving a final audit with zero findings and no improvement needed. The process saw significant adoption of automation and evidence trail creation to improve information security across the organisation.
• Providing Data Protection Officer (DPO) to the whole organisation, advising on and creating standards to ensure company information governance was prioritised

Associate Director of Engineering - Healx Sept 2021 - Jan 2023
Hired to help Healx scale their drug discovery pipelines through both people growth and broader technical improvement, with cross-functional tech and scientific teams. A heavy driver of organisational culture, helping both direct and indirect teams move towards high performing, and accelerating Healx drug discovery efforts.

• Scaled organisation, delivering a hiring strategy, rewrites of hiring and onboarding process to increase hiring consistency and success, 3-4x growth with 11 successful direct hires, and multiple manager/director hires across the org. Created and onboarded a number of new teams - platform engineering, product engineering, and support more widely to help meet the scaling needs of the organisation.
• Delivered cross-tech growth support, devising, delivering, and open-sourcing a career growth framework, mentoring and coaching managers, and mentoring engineers in their career growth. Delivered supporting guidance, and advised on growth frameworks for Product Management and Design, and I’m now driving growth frameworks for Managers and the broader organisation.
• Driver and connector for company strategy - lead or active on tech strategy group, scaling group, drug matching groups, compliance/QMS, and others. Active in funding rounds, driving content and presentations for Series C funding. Providing all of that context to teams to maximise their commercial and company impact via OKRs and broader team strategies.
• Led organisational and process efficiencies, delivering process improvement research and value stream mapping exercises, taking complex processes and optimising, taking ~1 month processes with heavy manual toil into ~2-3 days of automation, improving speed of delivery and feedback loops for all teams involved.
• Strong driver of technical strategy and practice
  • Developed and Delivered a cloud strategy to transition a legacy cloud platform with significant manual toil and bottlenecks, and optimising for automation, developer experience, and security posture.
  • Built out cloud principles and practices at Healx, drove platform engineering to build out an in-place replacement for the legacy platform, allowing engineers to move from idea to production easily, and quickly - shifting from ‘weeks’ to ‘minutes’ for new workload orchestration, improving value delivery and speed to market hugely.
  • Focusing the team around optimal cloud usage, bringing about ~20% (~£110,000) annual saving in cloud costs, without any detrimental impact to users, stability, or performance.
  • Driver on Legacy Data Migration - ran workshops, and helped build strategy and plan for migration between significant legacy data storage and a more manageable, scalable solution.
• Measurable impact with teams and culture, having a ‘top 5%’ manager 360 review cross company, and having impact on Engagement (raising scores from 6.0 to 8.5 in 2021), Loyalty (4.4 to 8.6) and building high scores for key impact drivers for commercial delivery - Autonomy 10.0, Management Support 10.0, Growth (Coaching and Mentoring) 10.0, Freedom of Opinion 9.8, Peer relationships 9.5, Recognition 9.3, Challenging work 9.2
• Active contributor to Healx culture
  • Engagement with Engineering SIG - delivering widely adopted RFCs for Code Review Best Practice, Coding Standards, Definitions of Ready/Done, Cloud Best Practice, Tech Lead, Principal/Staff Archetypes, Third Party Oversight (TPO)
  • Delivery of Feedback and Emotional Intelligence workshop, Psychological Safety talks (company wide + managers),
  • Lead on Culture Champions groups, driving people strategy with People team, occasional Chair of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion group
  • Published opinion pieces externally on platform teams and psychological safety

Director of Software Engineering - GlaxoSmithKline Nov 2018 - Sept 2021
Leading teams of remote software and platform engineers within a cross-functional environment, delivering digital products and a cloud platform to support patients and healthcare practitioners. Brought to GSK to be a ‘nucleus for change’ as the organisation underwent a number of ‘transformations’, and have guided, advised and supported throughout. I delivered an effective vision and strategy for the team and helped amplify context and direction, supporting the team to link quarterly OKRs with wider organisational goals. My role at GSK is primarily to lead an engineering team, though I’ve had the opportunity to have a far broader impact across the whole tech organisation.

Key achievements:

• Led the handover of a digital e-commerce product which processes $200m in sales (GSK Direct) from a tech team in the US to our own without any issue. Then orchestrated effective ownership, improvement and ways of working on the product. Improved lead time, helping the teams to cut waste from the release process while still safely getting products into production - 25% improvement in release cadence.
• Led a team of cloud engineers to orchestrate a highly effective, automated cloud platform on GCP, raising the bar for governance, security and zero trust operation. The outcome of this was a ‘0-60 vision’ to allow builder teams to go from idea to production, safely, securely and compliant, in under 60 minutes. See medium.com/gsktech for posts from the team. Challenged and changed bureaucracy around process to reduce human interaction/handoffs in the delivery value stream significantly.
• Designed, orchestrated, and delivered a programme of psychological safety - awareness, measurement, and behaviour change. I’ve rolled this out to thousands of employees and managers now in multiple areas of the organisation (Pharma, Supply Chain, Consumer Healthcare, Legal), leading to active, measurable improvement of underlying culture in many areas.
• Minimised time-to-productive for new employees by overhauling the staff onboarding process. It allows new engineers to get up to speed rapidly, and they are often shipping value within the first week.
• Created an organisational focus on technical excellence by co-creating the GSK Tech Blog (medium.com/gsktech), giving builder teams a window to share and amplify the tech culture within GSK. This has been cited in a number of interviews across the organisation as a driver for recruitment.
• Focus on culture change and growth across the organisation, spearheading and leading topics within a tech culture network, and amplifying them to change across thousands of tech employees. Topics covered inclusion and diversity, mental health, management, and leadership.

Development Team Lead - Bingo – tombola Aug 2015 → Nov 2018
Web Team Lead – tombola Jul 2012 → Aug 2015
Development Project Lead – tombola Aug 2009 → Jul 2012
Senior Developer – tombola Aug 2009 → Sep 2011
Lead architect, engineer, and team management within the bingo division, focusing on a technical overhaul of all work, and heading up the people development of the engineering team as well as increasing the overall collaboration and communication within the wider organisation. I maximised some key learnings here around building, adapting, and owning high-traffic software, and managing teams in the ownership of those products.

Key achievements:

• Design and re-architecture of legacy codebase into a modern modular multi-tenant solution, helping the business scale from £10m to £20+m in profits (on approx £90m revenue).
• Significant driver on a move to cloud (AWS) from on-prem - drove ownership costs down and improved resilience and performance. Monthly bills settled at around £125k from nearer £160k.
• Drove the technology to enable international expansion, helping tombola become market leaders in Spain and Italy and expanding UK presence with an Arcade offering.
• Replaced manual releasing with Continuous Delivery, reducing MTTR from hours to minutes and improving deployment frequency to daily. Introduced automated testing across the full delivery pipeline, significantly improving Change Failure Rate and reducing customer-impacting incidents from multiple per month to a handful per year.
• Delivered data-driven product improvements by integrating ELK, New Relic and others - enabling measurable decisions across the product. Notable outcomes: 71,000 reduction in password reset walkaways, 18% reduction in failed logins, and push notification adoption exceeding 80% within six months of launch.

Development Team Lead – Fawthrop McLanders Jan 2006 → Aug 2009
Team and architecture lead; Build of e-commerce/CRM platform that was rolled out to many clients (ranging from £20k-£200k/annum sales); Led on ‘Microsoft Partner’ accreditation for the products, achieving significant internal cost savings on licensing; Stakeholder and client management.

Senior Software Developer – SCHIN Ltd Mar 2000 → Jan 2006
Engineering team lead within health informatics; Design and Development on first in class appraisal system for NHS GPs to address post-Shipman lack of transparency; Delivery of clinical decision-making tooling for active use by GPs during consultation; Key external stakeholder management - Department of Health, Healthcare Practitioners, Trusts and Practices.

Software Developer – Newcastle University 1996 → 2000
Many ‘early web’ solutions delivered; Unix system administration

Public Talks / Workshops

As part of my own growth, I take the uncomfortable step of delivering talks on subjects I’m passionate about. This encourages me to research and learn the topic more broadly, but also to maximise the impact of that learning by sharing. I’ve given talks internally to a number of organisations, and at conferences on a number of topics.

• Psychological Safety - north east tech leaders user group, SEACON (youtube link), GSK agility conference, and many other internal awareness sessions. Also ran workshops on high-performing behaviours, understanding risk, and manager/leader behaviours.
• Active LGBT+ Ally - spoken on transgender parenting at panels for NHS Business Authority, Diageo, Scott Logic, and within GSK on transgender parenting and allyship.
• Feedback & Emotional Intelligence - talks on empathy, emotional intelligence, and effective feedback to north east tech leaders and internally at GSK and Healx.
• Further topics - DevOps (human side) to user groups and conferences; personal productivity; value stream mapping and systems thinking; effective remote working.

The Human Part

My other passions in life are my family, and spending time with them. As my kids reach their teenage years, it’s fun to share music/gigs with them, go to the gym, explore photography, and all those things that are truly valuable in life. I enjoy hill walking, and doing this with my family is part of the reason I work.

When I'm not doing these other things, I can generally be found running or cycling - I do both for clubs, and although injury and age have taken away chances of trophies, I still compete with myself, and find it a great outlet for self-challenge.

I also am an aspiring author, and the website at the top (https://brilliantmanagers.info) is the start of a journey for me in creating some tooling and discussion around the fact that everyone deserves a brilliant manager. The book is still in the “mind maps and scribbled notes” stage at the moment, but if I put it in my CV and talk about it enough, peer pressure will see me have to work on it! :)

Education

BSc Computing – Northumbria University