Will Poynter

Sheffield, UK · will@williampoynter.co.uk

I am an engineering leader and independent technical consultant with 15 years’ experience across backend development, data architecture and technical leadership. I started as a keen hobbyist, teaching myself to write software at university in the PHP-and-MySQL era. Early roles often meant being the most senior engineer, sometimes the only one, and developing the full stack. I have always been drawn most strongly to backend, systems and data problems.

My work has particular depth in healthcare, research and data-rich products. I have built systems from the ground up, led platform, security and compliance functions, and grown engineering organisations to more than 70 people. I enjoy building great teams: models such as Agile, tribes and squads are useful, but the people in a team always matter more than the model.

I focus on product development, technical strategy and helping teams adopt AI thoughtfully. I co-founded ResearchWiseAI, a platform that automates survey-data analysis and reporting, and work with organisations on architecture, team building and delivery.

Outside work, I keep moving: I have completed around 20 half marathons and cycled Land’s End to John o’ Groats. I am also a PADI scuba diver and RYA Day Skipper.

Projects

Products and platforms I have created or led technically.

Publications

A collection of articles, talks and blog posts I have created over the years. Where the original publisher still hosts the work, each entry links back to it.

White paper - Bringing it Home

A case for moving storage and computation into homes to give people more control of their data, strengthen UK digital sovereignty and support a more distributed, lower-carbon internet.
June 2026

Article - Put AI at the centre of your product

A practical argument for making AI a product and organisational concern, rather than a layer of novelty on top.
October 2025

Talk - Agents and AI: What they are and where they are going

A ResearchWiseAI Talking AI episode on the spectrum of agents and their applications in market research.
March 2025

Blog - My First Experiment with Bun

Bun's claims of being substantially faster than their competitors and being able to just drop Bun in to replace incumbents such as Jest, are true. From being able to execute TypeScript directly, no longer worrying about the separation of ESM and CommonJS and being far more plug-n-play than Jest, Bun won me over very quickly.
September 2023 The happy Bun logo

Presentation - An Application of Search Engine Topics Through the Use of DDI-3.2 Concepts

CLOSER is a consortium of eight UK longitudinal studies for the purpose of increasing the use, value and impact of longitudinal research. CLOSER’s flagship product is Discovery, a DDI-backed search engine for the documentation and appraisal for the eight consortium studies. To enhance the searchability of Discovery all Variables and QuestionConstructs in Discovery require a Topic from CLOSER's controlled vocabulary. Archivist provides bespoke infrastructure for inputting topic allocations. Through the use of Strands and Clusters the work has been reduced by 75%. Further savings are being implemented using deep learning to aid data managers.
December 2017 The logo of the EDDI conference series

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Experience

Chief Technology Officer & Co-founder

ResearchWiseAI
Co-founded ResearchWiseAI, a product that automates market-research survey-data analysis using generative AI. I owned the technical architecture and product direction from concept through customer delivery.
Aug 2023 - Feb 2026

Consultant

Independent
Advise clients on technical strategy, team building and product development. I also deliver training on AI adoption and domain-driven design for engineering teams.
Nov 2022 - Present

Chief Technology Officer

Tinto
Led IT, product delivery, architecture, security and compliance for a UK startup connecting mothers. Built and ran the engineering function end-to-end as its sole technical leader at C-level.
Nov 2020 - Nov 2022

Director of Engineering

Babylon Health

Led the Platform: Foundation tribe, formerly Membership & Enterprise, providing leadership and architectural oversight across identity and access management, multi-tenancy, membership management, consent, feature control, profile management and data-subject tooling.

The tribe also supported the Core Business Services squad, which held deep knowledge of some of Babylon’s longest-running systems. At its peak, Platform: Foundation included more than 70 people, including 55 engineers.

Feb 2019 - Nov 2020

Squad Lead

Babylon Health

Led the Consumer & Business squad and, with its product manager, redefined it as Core Business Services to clarify its remit. Grew the team from 5 to 25 people, then reorganised its wide-ranging responsibilities into several spin-off squads.

Core Business Services, the new squads and an existing team then formed Membership & Enterprise, one of Babylon’s first platform tribes, which I went on to lead.

May 2018 - Feb 2019

Senior Engineer

Babylon Health
Developed backend systems in Ruby as part of Babylon’s Core Team, focusing on complex, cross-cutting concerns. Delivered federated authentication with partners, replaced an integer identifier system that was not designed for global scale, and prepared legacy systems for GDPR.
Jan 2018 - May 2018

Technical Manager

CLOSER, University College London

Led engineering for CLOSER Discovery, a search engine publishing documentation from some of the UK’s largest and longest-running longitudinal studies. Owned engineering decisions, technical consultancy and coordination between participating organisations.

Chaired the Technical Oversight Committee and served as lead engineer for the search engine and its metadata tooling.

Jan 2016 - Dec 2017

Metadata Officer

CLOSER, University College London
Managed a team of Metadata Assistants enhancing longitudinal-study documentation retrospectively. Established documentation standards and procedures to maintain consistent, high-quality metadata across the participating studies.
Feb 2014 - Jan 2016

Chief Technology Officer

Research Through Gaming
Led technical architecture for a game-based market-research platform. Worked with clients, external development teams and hosting providers to deliver bespoke data-collection games. All projects collected personal information, so I ensured compliance with the Data Protection Act and appropriate informed-consent processes.
Jul 2013 - Jan 2014

Database Developer

Research Through Gaming
Built a bespoke data-collection tool for rapidly designing and curating game-based surveys. Led development of its database and supporting tools using PHP and MySQL.
May 2012 - Jul 2013

Skills

Architecture
  • Microservices
  • GraphQL
  • Serverless
  • CQRS
  • RESTful APIs
  • Autoscaling
Languages
  • JavaScript
  • TypeScript
  • Ruby
  • C++
  • Rust
  • PHP
  • Java
  • C#
  • SQL
  • Bash
AI & automation
  • LLM application engineering
  • Agent workflows
  • LangGraph
  • n8n
  • Zapier
Infrastructure & cloud
  • Kubernetes
  • Docker
  • AWS
  • Google Cloud
  • OpenTofu
  • Terraform
  • Ansible
  • Flux
  • GitLab
  • Pangolin
  • Cloudflare
  • Proxmox
  • Ceph
Data
  • PostgreSQL
  • MySQL
  • Valkey
  • Redis
  • Elasticsearch
  • Kafka
  • S3
Frameworks & platforms
  • Next.js
  • React
  • React Native
  • Ruby on Rails
  • Express
  • Hugo
  • WordPress
Observability
  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • Headlamp
  • ELK
  • OpenTelemetry
Leadership
  • Team building & hiring
  • Domain-driven design
  • Product delivery
  • Security & GDPR compliance

Education

The University of Manchester

2011 - 2012

The University of Manchester

Bachelor of Science
Physics (2:1)
A Tuning Device for a Musical Instrument
2008 - 2011

Bilborough College

A-Level
  • Maths (A)
  • Physics (A)
  • Electronics (A)
  • General Studies (B)
2006 - 2008

The Gedling School

GCSE
  • Double Science
  • Maths
  • English Literature
  • English Language
  • Religious Studies
  • Design & Technology
2001 - 2006