What do you do and what is it about your job that gets you out of bed in the morning?
I lead multi disciplined engineering teams that are responsible for Onfido’s core platform cloud infrastructure, test engineering, data integrity and our client dashboards. This group enables Onfido to develop products quickly, safely and efficiently for our clients. I also lead and founded the Technical Programme Management team which is the function that has enabled Onfido to scale product and technology execution to use digital identity to verify access to millions of people.
What gets me out of bed:
- My teams
- The cool problems I get to solve with my teams!
How did you get to where you are today?
My experience has been across a diverse set of disciplines and technical industries but underpinned through delivering large-scale complex programs, team development, leadership and research. Before joining Onfido, I was at Tesco Online Fulfillment, Morgan Advanced Materials and the Atomic Weapons Establishment. I hold a degree from the University of Manchester, MEng Material Science & Engineering. Leading such a diverse skill set of people now reflects the diversity in experience I have had which is really fun.
What is the most important lesson you have learned along the way?
It's always scary at first especially when you are working in an innovative space & the best ideas can often be found at the intersections of domains.
What's your pitch to CEOs in the identity space? What do you suggest they START / STOP / CONTINUE doing and why?
START reviewing whether your team reflects the people they serve
STOP looking at identity through the lens of users in a few countries like USA, UK, - global mobility as well as global interactions and transactions will only continue to grow for e.g.
I could be in another part of the world in under 24hrs and need to be able to transact and access services
- I could be at home accessing services or transacting with someone on the other side of the world
- I could be from another country different to where I am not a resident
- I could be a native of an of the mobile first and emerging markets of the world
This has many implications for e.g. to name a few
- Global coverage
- Fair and non discriminatory products
- Service levels consistency around world
- Regulation compliance
CONTINUE keeping security, reliability and privacy at the forefront. For everyday people to interact and rely on digital identity providers our solutions have to be trusted and reliable.
In one sentence, why does diversity matter to you?
It matters for many reasons but in the identity space its business critical.
What book/film/piece of art would you recommend to your fellow members? Why?
- On the topic of technologies impact on identities (must read) ruha benjamin race after technology
- Books that gave me an aha moment Range David Epstein & A Uterus Is a Feature , Sarah Lacy
- Current reads Land How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World book by Simon Winchester and (through Onfido Bookclub) Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems, Martin Kleppman
What advice would you give to the teenage 'you'?
It's okay to not know what you want to be because:
- You you don't have to do just one thing
- Most of the things you will work on don’t exist yet - hint; that's why you will love it!
Where can we find you on social media / the Web?