Senior Software Engineering Manager at Bede Gaming. I’ve led up to four direct reports and 15 engineers across six regulated markets, owning how players register, verify their identity, sign in and stay protected. That included four market launches and a 100k+ player migration from another provider.
Career
Bede Gaming
B2B iGaming platform provider powering online casino, bingo and sports operators.
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Senior Software Engineering Manager
Led up to four direct reports (engineering managers and a staff software engineer) and 15 engineers. Together we owned how players registered, verified their identity, signed in and stayed protected, from the first sign-up to self-exclusion and regulator reporting.
Accountable for prioritisation, roadmap and capacity, defect and tech-debt decisions, and the technical design of large-scale features, setting priorities with product owners and compliance teams.
- Owned the systems every player passes through: registration, identity and login, the player profile, verification and fraud controls, self-exclusion and regulator reporting, and the operator tools behind them, meeting a 99.99% uptime SLA.
- Delivered player onboarding for four new regulated market launches: Germany, Ontario (Canada), Brazil and New Zealand, adding contractors for Germany and Ontario and building configurable multi-tenancy so Brazil and New Zealand shared one environment.
- Drove the migration of 100k+ players and millions of transactions from another provider, delegating workstreams across internal teams and an external data migration specialist while keeping data integrity, reconciliation and customer continuity.
- Owned the engineering implementation and ongoing compliance of my services across jurisdictions: UK Gambling Commission requirements including GamStop and GamProtect, Germany’s LUGAS and OASIS, Ontario’s AGCO rules, and identity, AML and risk-monitoring checks through specialist providers.
- Managed two release cadences side by side: an operator on a twice-yearly release cycle while the platform shipped every two weeks, with scope, capacity and release risk planned around the mismatch.
- Led AI-assisted engineering: an estimated 74% less effort on the .NET 10 upgrade than on .NET 8, five back-office apps moved off end-of-life frameworks in seven weeks, 994 dependency alerts fixed in six months with open alerts down 83%, and AI agents investigating failed test runs and triaging the defect backlog, with people approving every change.
- Shaped the workstream’s direction: owned the roadmap for all non-customer work with compliance, product and the principal engineer; made the case for extra headcount in critical periods; influenced training budget towards gaps such as advanced SQL; and weighed in on build-versus-buy, including keeping authentication in-house.
- Developed four leaders internally: three engineering managers and a staff engineer. Retention and workstream eNPS stayed above the company average, backed by 9-box succession planning.
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Software Engineering Manager
My first permanent people-management role: a team of four, three developers and a QA, delivering Germany’s player-protection and compliance features.
- Delivered Germany’s player-protection features on time and with a very low defect rate: deposit limits, cooling-off periods, the panic button, regulatory reporting, and the integration with OASIS, Germany’s national self-exclusion system.
- Made a fixed operator launch and a date agreed with the regulator. I locked in cross-team dependencies early, had performance testing ready ahead of time, and agreed ring-fenced release slots for out-of-cycle releases.
- Delivered the LUGAS reporting integration while the regulator’s system was still immature, and Bede became one of the first companies to achieve LUGAS certification.
- Introduced sprint health checks: on the first and last day of each sprint the team reviewed component health, from failing nightly tests and background jobs to logs and performance metrics. Issues in our components dropped, releases went out with more confidence because the tests behind them were more reliable, and the practice later became standard across my workstream.
- Coached two developers who went on to lead their own teams.
- Supported our QA from manual testing into automation, and then into a development role elsewhere in the business.
- Hired for the first time, backfilling that QA role and replacing a developer who left.
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Software Engineer
Payment services: the integrations operators rely on to take deposits and pay out winnings, across cards, digital wallets, bank transfers and omni-channel retail payments, built as .NET services on Azure with SQL Server. In payments a mistake costs operators and players money directly, so correctness and security came first.
- Built Operator Gateway, a common interface that let operators plug in their own payment gateways while the platform kept its reporting, limits and controls in place. Several operators adopted it.
- Led smaller features end to end, including new payment methods on existing gateways and payment compliance changes for markets such as the UK.
- Led features and virtual teams, and joined hiring by reviewing candidates’ technical tests and sitting on interview panels. It’s where I first learned to deliver through other people.
Before Bede
Customer service, testing and development, 2013 to 2016. The groundwork for building regulated gambling platforms.
Associate .NET Developer
Saggezza
Full-stack .NET in a Scrum team, with ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework and AngularJS, built test-first.
Test Analyst
The Test People
Performance and test automation for client systems, using Python, Selenium, Appium and Citrix tooling.
Customer Service Agent
William Hill
My first job in gambling, on the customer side of betting operations, where I trained as a Duty Manager.
Education & certifications
CMI Level 5, Operations / Departmental Manager Apprenticeship
Completed alongside my engineering management roles, covering leadership, operational management, finance and change.
BSc (Hons) Games Programming
Course representative, acting as the link between students and faculty.