Christopher Little-Savage, Head of Engineering

As the first engineering hire, I laid the technical foundations for the current iteration of the PowerX AI platform. I had full authority over evaluating new technologies and maintaining a technical roadmap to carefully balance pace of innovation against long-term maintenance requirements.

As my responsibilities increased, I grew and managed a team of up to 15 people, collaborating with data and AI specialists to build sophisticated ML pipelines. I also worked with domain experts to quickly assimilate knowledge of site power electronics, allowing me to understand product requirements and bridge the gap between commercial and technical teams.

Managing an international team of six external and internal developers, I was fully responsible for the delivery of technical solutions from research prototype through to released product. As well as this managerial work, I was also involved in all aspects of implementation, including solution design, development and code review.

Our flagship product was the GSMA Interoperability Test Platform, which aimed to harmonise APIs between some of the world's biggest network operators.

I started Tyro to tackle the technical skills gap in Uganda. I combined a unique curriculum of modern web development skills with a collaborative Agile workflow which allowed our apprentices to work on commercial projects with very limited practical experience.

I was directly involved in the recruitment of a team of nine local developers of mixed abilities, and was responsible for continuously monitoring their learning and development alongside making technical contributions on more advanced projects.

Using my expertise in rapid product development, I have been able to advise and assist in the delivery of proofs of concept and minimum viable products for startups around the world.

Wanting to consolidate and validate my understanding of modern systems architecture, I took two days of self-study to pass this challenging AWS exam. My final mark was over 97% on a scale normalized for difficulty.

I took courses covering Machine Learning, Data-Processing Systems, Security, Functional Programming and Programming Language Usability. My final dissertation looked at building a hybrid graph database aiming to bridge the performance gap with relational databases.

For my undergraduate dissertation, I designed and implemented a novel type-inference system for JavaScript, and accompanying compiler to protect typed JavaScript from unchecked code. I went on to present this research at an international conference on functional programming.