Engineering Manager · Technical Lead · Aspiring Head of Engineering
Tom Swindell
11+ years building and leading engineering teams across gambling & sports data, ecommerce, and telematics. Known for steady delivery, improving team operating rhythm, and driving the performance work that reduces incidents and cost. Now looking to take the next step into a Head of Engineering role.
My Stance
On AI
“AI won't necessarily take your job. But someone using AI definitely will.”
I believe AI is the most important productivity multiplier available to engineers and engineering leaders right now. Not a gimmick, not a threat, just a tool. And like any tool, the people who learn to use it well will move faster, think bigger, and deliver more than those who don't.
This site is a practical example of that. I built it using Kiro an AI-powered IDE, in a matter of minutes, using my CV as the only input. Design, content, structure, deployment config: all of it. What would have taken a day of work became an afternoon experiment.
That's the mindset I bring to engineering leadership. AI should be embedded in how your team works every single day, in how they write code, review it, document it, debug it, and think about problems. The teams that treat AI as a daily habit rather than an occasional shortcut are the ones that will compound their output over time.
The question isn't whether to use AI. It's whether you're using it enough.
Career
Experience
- ▸Restructured a 16-person squad into two squads of 8 with clear ownership, goals and delivery focus.
- ▸Moved the team from Kanban back to Scrum to rebuild agile discipline and improve predictability.
- ▸Led performance and stability improvements for the Super Bowl, delivered incident-free.
- ▸Identified and driving five concurrent workstreams tied to performance and business objectives.
- ▸Improved release cadence from fortnightly to weekly without sacrificing quality.
- ▸Improved agile ways of working and tightened delivery loops to increase throughput and predictability.
- ▸Mentored a team of 4 iOS engineers across technical and soft skills.
- ▸Worked closely with product and engineering leadership to improve prioritisation, sprint goals and engineering standards.
- ▸Built Swift and C++ code operating at very large scale across tens of millions of devices.
- ▸Delivered performant, reliable changes with strong attention to detail.
- ▸Worked in a highly technical environment with strong discipline around testing, maintainability and quality.
- ▸Delivered high quality software within a small team of iOS engineers.
- ▸Implemented a custom framework to parallelise UI regression tests, reducing automation time from ~15h to ~45m.
- ▸Promoted from Senior iOS Engineer to Head of Mobile Development, leading a team of 7.
- ▸Led a major refactor that enabled rapid delivery of new white-label apps.
- ▸Reduced white-label app delivery time from weeks to a single day, enabling the business to scale onboarding and revenue.
Capabilities
Skills
Leadership
Engineering
Delivery & Process
Impact
Key Highlights
Super Bowl: Incident Free
Led performance and stability improvements at Entain ahead of the Super Bowl, one of the highest-traffic events in sports betting. Delivered without a single incident.
15h → 45min Test Suite
At bet365, implemented a custom framework to parallelise UI regression tests, cutting automation time from ~15 hours to ~45 minutes, a 95% reduction that unblocked the team's delivery pipeline.
White-Label Apps: Weeks → 1 Day
Led a major architectural refactor at Matrix Telematics that reduced white-label app delivery time from weeks to a single day, directly enabling the business to scale onboarding and revenue.
Tens of Millions of Devices
At VMware, built Swift and C++ code operating at very large scale across tens of millions of devices, with strong discipline around testing, maintainability and quality.
Squad Restructure
Restructured a 16-person squad at Entain into two focused squads of 8 with clear ownership and goals, rebuilding agile discipline and improving release cadence from fortnightly to weekly.
Strong Opinion
Required Reading
Two books I think every engineer who wants to lead a team should read. Not optional.
The Phoenix Project
Gene Kim, Kevin Behr & George Spafford
If you're going to lead an engineering team, read this first. Not because it's a technical book, it isn't. But because it'll change how you think about flow, bottlenecks, and why your team is always firefighting. It's the closest thing to a cheat code for engineering leadership.
View on Amazon UK →The Unicorn Project
Gene Kim
The Phoenix Project told the story from ops. The Unicorn Project tells it from the developer's side, and it hits just as hard. If you want to understand why your best engineers are frustrated, and what it actually feels like to work in a system that's fighting against you, this is it.
View on Amazon UK →Let's Talk
Get in Touch
Aspiring Head of Engineering with 11+ years of experience leading teams and delivering at scale. Passionate about engineering leadership, building high-performing teams, and driving technical excellence.