Qatalog: Remote
Director, Core Engineering: - present
Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js, Postgres, Redis, Elasticsearch, GCP
I was the first engineering hire at Qatalog, a startup building a structured workspace for organisations.
I designed the data model and built the first version of the backend from scratch; initially taking sole responsibility for implementation, then hiring and mentoring as funding enabled us to grow the team to 20 engineers.
Based on my previous experience in open-source, I instigated a culture of radical transparency to encourage collaboration between remote engineers. This included using ADRs to democratise decision-making, draft PRs to make in-progress work visible, structured commit messages to automate release notes, and Slack as a public log for infrastructure changes and bug investigations.
After OpenAI launched ChatGPT, I led the engineering team through a major pivot to put LLMs and RAG at the heart of the product. We rapidly built a permission-oriented framework that restricted access to authorised data and gave the user manual approval of agentic actions.
For most of the time there were no ops staff on the team, so I took responsibility for managing and maintaining our production infrastructure in GCP. This included a significant migration of the backend stack from europe-west to us-east and multiple zero-downtime Postgres upgrades.