David Neale.
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.
My career: from police software, to Google, to the UK's first digital census, to Admiral Money.
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 sharpened how I think about engineering. Achieving my Sailplane Pilot Licence and working towards other endorsements has 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).
2021 UK Digital-First Census - one huge event, every ten years.
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.
A technical review of the delivery can be downloaded from the ONS: Delivering the Census 2021 digital service.
Stack - technologies I've had the most exposure to
Architecture & Strategy
- Cloud Architecture
- Technical Strategy
- API Design
- Microservices
- Distributed Systems
- TOGAF
- Cybersecurity
- Gen AI
Cloud & Infrastructure
- Amazon Web Services
- Google Cloud Platform
- Kubernetes
- Docker
- Linux
- git
Languages & Frameworks
- Cloud Code
- Python
- Go
- TypeScript
- React
- Java
- Terraform
Data
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
- DynamoDB
Certifications
- AWS SA Professional
- AWS SA Associate
- TOGAF® 9
- CCSP
Professional experience
Chief Architect
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.
Technical Lead
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.
Senior Developer
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.
Senior Web Developer
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.
Senior Web Developer
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.
Software Engineer
Formative technology experience, working initially in 2nd line application support and then in software development.
What I'm working on and thinking about.
Electronics & embedded systems
Working through Arduino projects and getting comfortable at the hardware/software boundary.
Glider avionics panel
Designing and building custom instrumentation for my PIK 20D.
Agentic AI in software delivery
Running Claude Code extensively across my engineering team and thinking about what agentic tooling means for how software gets built.