David Neale

Chief Architect

As Chief Architect, I lead the technology strategy and oversee the development of scalable and secure systems.

I joined the company when it had loan balances of £400m before it was profit making. I’ve been instrumental in driving the company’s growth and technological advancements and in 2025 it managed balances of £1.8bn with a profit of £26m.

Significant technological achievements include:

• Direct integration with Price Comparison Website offering real rate loan quotes. This included the onboarding and integration of a high-performance decision engine system.
• Design and delivery of a secure, scalable microservice application development platform.
• Design and implementation of a loan originations system, the success of which has let to its extension to include wider CRM capabilities.
• Led AI adoption across the business: introduced LibreChat as a governed, self-hosted LLM platform giving staff controlled access to frontier models; deployed Claude Code for agentic developer tooling; and ran early-stage experiments in underwriting summarisation and AI-assisted contact centre tooling (voice bots, chat assistants).

Tech: Kubernetes, Amazon Web Services, Go, Terraform, Docker

Technical Lead

Joined as tech lead on a multidisciplinary team developing and supporting a dynamic form builder application to run online surveys.

I then joined a team comprised predominantly of technical architects to focus on the architectural design of the systems that ran the 2021 UK digital-first census. Key contributions:

• Led the cloud portability work: migrating the census data collection platform from AWS to GCP to demonstrate infrastructure independence and introduce Kubernetes-native deployments.
• Designed a highly scalable performance testing solution capable of simulating the predicted peak load of 1 million concurrent users, generating sufficiently realistic synthetic traffic at that scale was a significant engineering challenge in itself.
• Worked across the software engineering, DevOps and architecture disciplines to translate architectural intent into working systems.

Tech: Kubernetes, Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Python, Go, Terraform, ReactJS, Docker

Senior Developer

Joined Potato as a contractor working on Google projects. The work went well enough that they offered me a permanent role, and I was promoted to senior developer not long after. Selected projects:

• Worked with the Open Source team in Google to architect two web applications to run each of their flagship programmes - Summer of Code and Code-in. Running in over 123 countries, these are Google’s largest developer outreach programmes. I was the technical lead on a team of up to 18 for the $2m project.
• Worked with Google Partners team to design a system to support an incentivisation programme for Google Partners. This had a worldwide user base and had to support a complex set of regional features along with being used in 30 languages. Also created a bespoke fault-tolerant distributed transaction system to synchronize data between apps
• Worked with Google Ideas (now Jigsaw) as the technical lead for the backend API on a platform to allow users to collaboratively discover, curate, analyze and share YouTube videos. See promotional video. This was later sold to Storyful and open-sourced

General responsibilities:

• Overall responsibility for the success of all assigned projects
• Worked alongside clients to design and deliver software to meet their requirements
• Mentored developers and helped manage their career progression
• Provided and delivered feedback to developers
• Guided and assisted developers through technical problems and blockers
• Encouraged and guided developers through architectural choices
• Spoke at industry events and contributed to the wider tech community as a representative of the company.
• Tech hiring

Rewrote the engineering hiring test to be both more revealing and more respectful of candidates’ time - the previous version took most people at least a day.

Tech: Python, Javascript, Go, Google App Engine, Django, AngularJS, ReactJS, MySQL, Cordova

Senior Web Developer

Initially employed by The Number to continue development of their ASP.NET MVC website. I later became involved in a new project to co-architect a cloud-hosted global search API to be used across all parts of The Number’s international parent company, Knowledge Generation Bureau (kgb).

During this time I became heavily involved with Python, Django, MongoDB, RabbitMQ and Elastic Search whilst working in a Scrum team. This project involved working with teams across the world to ensure that client applications were developed to best harness the API.

I also wrote a durable, multi-threaded distribution system to keep the data reliable and correctly indexed from the SQL server reference databases to MongoDB and Elastic.

Tech: C#, Python, Javascript, ASP.NET MVC, Django, Amazon Web Services (AWS), MongoDB, MS SQL Server, ElasticSearch, RabbitMQ

Senior Web Developer

Employed by Zipporah as their senior developer in order to re-architect their suite of solutions in order to consolidate disparate functionality, add new features and uplift the core technologies. Guided a team of six developers in use of MVC, NHibernate, IoC, unit testing and other techniques to produce better-maintainable software. Liaised with technical director and directly with clients in order to gather and analyse business requirements. Ensured that software is fit for use using continuous integration to build, test, and deploy checked-in software. The software is still widely in use across local government organisations in UK and Australia. An example can be seen in Kent County Council.

Tech: C#, Javascript, ASP.NET MVC, MS SQL Server

Software Engineer

Formative technology experience working initially in 2nd line application support and then in software development.