I help organisations build, deliver and manage software that’s reliable, secure, and effective.
Currently owning the technology strategy for a £1.8bn consumer lending business.
Before that: police software, Google's developer programmes, and the UK's first
digital-first census.
From police software, to Google, to the UK’s first digital census, to Admiral Money.
David NealeCardiff, UK
Varied technologies, a range of industries, and always with complex trade-offs.
I'm currently Chief Architect at Admiral Money, where I own the
technology strategy for a £1.8bn consumer lending business.
I've also been driving adoption of AI tooling: from governed LLM access across the
business, to agentic developer tooling with Claude Code, to early-stage
experiments in contact-centre automation.
Aviation has changed how I think about engineering. Achieving my Sailplane Pilot
Licence and working towards other endorsements involves systems thinking and human factors.
In safety-critical environments, clear checklists, unambiguous communication and disciplined
decision-making are what keeps things from going wrong. I bring that same diligence to
architecture decisions and incident response.
Outside of work you'll usually find me flying, travelling around in my camper van, tinkering
with electronics, cooking, walking, or playing music (piano and guitar).
Featured work
2021 UK Digital-First Census
One huge event, every ten years.
Case study · Office for National Statistics2018 – 2019
Client
Office for National Statistics
Dates
2018 – 2019
Role
Technical Lead / Architect
Scale
~1M concurrent users
The UK holds a census once a decade and 2021 was the first to be designed digital-first.
The challenge
The existing survey data collection platform was running on AWS. The architectural
team had two mandates: prove that the system was cloud-portable by migrating it to
Google Cloud Platform, and validate that it could handle the anticipated peak load -
roughly one million households attempting to complete simultaneously on census day.
My role
I joined the ONS architecture team as a technical lead for the electronic questionnaire
(eQ) application. I subsequently moved into the Cloud Architecture team to work
across software engineering, DevOps and architecture. I led the AWS-to-GCP cloud portability work,
introducing Kubernetes-native deployments as part of the migration. I also designed
the performance testing strategy — generating a million concurrent, realistic
synthetic users is a non-trivial problem in itself, requiring careful modelling of
submission behaviour and infrastructure headroom. This required close working with
Google engineers to consider usage patterns that were beyond their usual planned levels.
The outcome
On 21 March 2021, the census launched and the digital collection system held. It handled
a peak of 30,186 requests per second with 427,838 submissions during that peak hour. The
groundwork laid during the architecture phase — cloud portability, Kubernetes
orchestration, validated performance envelopes — proved robust under real-world
load. It remains one of the largest public-sector digital delivery projects in UK
government history.
Lead the technology strategy and oversee the development of scalable and secure
systems. Joined when the company had £400m of loan balances pre-profit; in 2025
it managed £1.8bn with £26m profit.
Direct integration with Price Comparison Websites offering real-rate loan quotes, including a high-performance decision engine.
Designed and delivered a secure, scalable microservice application platform.
Designed and implemented a loan originations system; extended into wider CRM capabilities.
Drove AI adoption across the business: governed self-hosted AI chat platform, Claude Code for agentic dev tooling, early contact-centre experiments.
Kubernetes
AWS
Go
Python
Terraform
Docker
2018 — 2019ONS · 1y 5m
Technical Lead
Office for National Statistics
Tech lead on a multidisciplinary team developing the dynamic form builder
powering online surveys. Moved into the architectural team focused on the 2021
UK digital-first census systems.
Led cloud portability: AWS to GCP migration with Kubernetes-native deployments.
Designed a scalable perf testing solution simulating 1M concurrent users.
Worked across engineering, DevOps and architecture disciplines.
Kubernetes
GCP
AWS
Python
Go
Terraform
React
Docker
2012 — 2018London · 5y 10m
Senior Developer
Potato London Ltd
Joined as a contractor working on Google projects and was offered a permanent
role; promoted to senior developer not long after.
Architected two web applications for Google's flagship open-source programmes — Summer of Code and Code-in — tech lead on a team of up to 18 on a $2m project in 123 countries.
Designed Google Partners' global incentivisation programme with 30-language support and a bespoke fault-tolerant distributed transaction system.
Tech lead for the backend API of Google Ideas' (Jigsaw) Montage - collaborative YouTube discovery platform, later sold to Storyful and open-sourced.
Rewrote engineering hiring test to be both more revealing and more respectful of candidates' time.
Python
JS
App Engine
Django
Angular
MySQL
2011 — 2012Cardiff · 1y 1m
Senior Web Developer
The Number UK Ltd (118 118)
Continued development of the ASP.NET MVC website, then co-architected a
cloud-hosted global search API used across kgb's international group. Wrote a
durable, multi-threaded distribution system keeping data indexed across SQL,
MongoDB and ElasticSearch.
C#
Python
ASP.NET MVC
Django
AWS
MongoDB
ElasticSearch
RabbitMQ
2010 — 2011Cardiff · 11m
Senior Web Developer
Zipporah Ltd
Re-architected a suite of solutions in use across local government in UK and
Australia. Guided a team of six in MVC, NHibernate, IoC and unit testing;
introduced continuous integration.
C#
JS
ASP.NET MVC
MS SQL Server
2007 — 2010Bristol · 3y 4m
Software Engineer
Avon and Somerset Constabulary
Formative technology experience, working initially in 2nd line application
support and then in software development.
Totals carried forward19 yrs6 companies80+ engineers led£1.8bn loan book
Projects
Personal projects
Things I’ve built to explore or solve. Everything listed is open source.
A browser-only tool for hand therapists: mark problem areas on a hand diagram, tag them with issue types and export a PNG for the case file. Nothing is saved or sent, and the tests prove it.
Drop a glider flight log in the browser and get a soaring debrief: the phase split, the climbs and their circle geometry, the wind, and the energy balance of the straight legs.
Interactive polar curve visualiser for gliders. Fetches real data from XCSoar, applies MacCready speed-to-fly theory, and supports ballast adjustments.
