Lead Cloud Engineer Lloyds Banking Group

Hi, I’m Sam.

I build cloud and data platforms that teams can rely on. Today I lead cloud engineering on a financial-crime intelligence data platform at Lloyds Banking Group.

See selected impact

Professional work

Selected impact

Measured improvements from platform and delivery work.

4h → 2h

Environment provisioning

Terraform pipeline · Publicis Sapient

½ day → <30 min

Release deployments

National Law Enforcement Data Programme · IBM

1 week → <5 min

Platform onboarding

Google Group creation · John Lewis & Partners

Worked with

  • Lloyds Banking Group
  • Publicis Sapient
  • IBM
  • John Lewis & Partners
  • Sage

What I’m known for

Cloud & Platform Engineering

Self-service platforms on AWS and GCP, built with Kubernetes, Terraform and CI/CD that cut delivery time and engineering toil.

Data Platforms

Leading cloud engineering on a financial-crime data platform at Lloyds, and exploring AI tooling by building small retrieval systems to understand how they actually work.

Engineering Leadership

Leading delivery, mentoring engineers across teams, and running tech-talk series that level up how whole orgs build.

Selected work

All work

Halving a Terraform Provisioning Pipeline

Professional work · 2022–2023

From four hours to two by measuring bottlenecks and simplifying the delivery path.

Inside the Kubernetes Cluster

Solo project · 2026

A local teaching dashboard for watching Kubernetes resources reconcile in real time.

Eval-First RAG

Solo project · 2025

A learning project: retrieval-augmented generation built from scratch, with evals to show where it fails.

A GCP Platform in Terraform

Reference build · 2023

Reusable VPC, GKE and IAM modules and a multi-environment delivery pattern teams can self-serve.

Recent writing

All writing

3 min read

Cutting a Terraform pipeline from four hours to two

A debugging story about provisioning bottlenecks, and a way of thinking about pipeline performance that generalises well beyond Terraform.

4 min read

Why I built a RAG system with no frameworks

Frameworks hide the parts of retrieval-augmented generation you most need to understand. Here's what I learned building one by hand, and why evaluation comes first.

4 min read

What actually happens when you kubectl apply

A walk through the Kubernetes control plane (API server, etcd, scheduler and controllers) and the project I built to watch it happen live.

Open to conversations about senior and staff platform, cloud and data engineering roles. UK-based and remote-friendly. Get in touch