Dom Barker
Hi! I'm an experienced technology leader who is equally happy dealing with people or computers. I build high performing teams and give smart people the environment they need to do their best work. I am an effective communicator and am comfortable with internal, customer, board or investor interactions. I specialise in early stage startups and have a wealth of experience of rapid development under pressure and managing the trade offs that come with it.
I'm currently working on a secret squirrel stealth mode startup that's going to help more people own their own home.
I live in Hitchin, Hertfordshire where I spend my time falling off bicycles, walking my dog or taking photos. If you'd like to get in touch feel free to email me.
Articles & Interviews
🎤Interview with CTO Craft📉On Technical Debt🏎Developing Software in Early Stage StartupsPrevious Projects
CTO at Birdaconservation
'Strava for Birdwatching', or social birding.
CTO at Fluidlyfinance
Fluidly is a ML / AI fintech that is helping small businesses manage, forecast and optimise their cashflow. I was the first hire and created the MVP with which we raised a pre-seed of £300k. I hired a team of 4 (1 data scientist + 3 engineers) and we extended the MVP, gained some customers and raised a seed round of £2m led by Octopus Ventures. I scaled the technology team to 12 (3 data scientists, 2 product people, 7 engineers) and took the business to a £5m series A. It is a complex service oriented SAAS application, ingesting and processing large volumes of data from multiple data sources. I had a seat on the board and frequently represented the company externally at conferences and webinars.
CTO at Metalhubretail
Tata Steel Digital ventures is a joint venture between the Boston Consulting Group and Tata Steel Europe. They set out to digitise the UK steel market which is still very old fashioned. I managed a team of 8 people across two products; MetalHub - a retail ecommerce marketplace that connected small steel buyers and suppliers and SteelScout - a B2B concierge service for ‘serious’ steel buyers. My team was 6 engineers and two designers. The team had been leaderless for a while so my main task was to re-motivate them and add some structure. I was a part of the senior management team, reporting to the Managing Director and the Venture Board.
VP Engineering at Quill Content / Jellyfishmedia
Consultant at Jigsaw.xyzfinance
Tech Lead at Which?publishing
Tech Lead at OpenXOmedia
I was the first hire at OpenXO where we set out to enable brands and locations to monetise their wifi networks. I hired a team of 4 and we scaled the product to 1M users. The solution consisted of a Golang microservices platform, a React front end, and a Ruby admin application.
Engineer at Unomeemixed
Unomee are an agency that took on lots of random small projects and one very big legal document management project. I handled the full software development life cycle for smaller projects, as well as providing front end javascript expertise for the big one.
Engineer at Earthwaremixed
Earthware specialised in interactive mapping, but took on other healthcare related projects (MD was ex pharma). I did a little bit of everything as I learned to code at a professional level.