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Adam Harper

Transformative SaaS Leader Driving Scalable Innovation, Operational Excellence, and Global Team Synergy

Address
Wye Valley, United Kingdom
Contact Number
+44 (0) 7597 265740
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/adam-harper-1012a0249

Veteran SaaS startup technical leader who relishes the challenges of building systems, perfecting the processes to support them, and developing the careers of colleagues working with them.

Adept at steering globally distributed, cross-functional teams to deliver transformative business outcomes through scalable systems, optimized processes, and a culture of accountability and innovation. Demonstrated expertise in fostering cohesive, asynchronous collaboration across time zones, achieving milestones such as increasing deployment frequency by 30% and decreasing change lead time by 40%.

Passionate about cultivating future leaders, aligning technical excellence with strategic goals, and advancing organizational growth in a remote-first environment.

Professional Experience

World-leading researcher, publisher, and provider of products and services supporting international education.

As the technical lead for Cambridge University Press & Assessment’s (CUPA’s) ELiT division I’ve driven organisational growth of a globally distributed team whilst fostering an increased sense of culture and community, mentored junior developers and first time managers, increased deployment frequency whilst reducing costs and maintaining reliability, and turned stalled projects into successes.

2023–presentTech Lead: Applied AI for English Language Assessment

  • Led strategic restructuring of existing engineering team resulting in a 30% increase in deployment frequency.Established and mentored team leads while defining clear ownership boundaries, resulting in improved service reliability and accelerated feature delivery across a micro-services architecture. Balanced delegation with guidance, enabling new leaders to develop leadership skills and strategic capabilities while ensuring consistent delivery quality.
  • Modernised DevOps infrastructure and practices reducing costs by 70% and change lead time 40%.Directed migration to GitHub Actions, championed automated quality controls and feature flags. Maintained exceptional reliability while increasing deployment frequency 30%.
  • Built and scaled globally distributed engineering teams increasing headcount by 50%Established asynchronous workflows and a culture of documentation enabling effective cross-timezone collaboration. Fostered cohesion through pair-programming and regular knowledge sharing sessions.
  • Created collaborative engineering culture achieving 90% participation in knowledge sharing initiatives.Established quarterly technology forums, cross-team squads and working groups, cross-functional book clubs, and standardized tooling practices to drive a shared sense of technical excellence across the organisation.
  • Delivered new business-critical platform serving 40,000 daily users within 12 months.Led team of four developers to rescue stalled project with close collaboration with the existing product owner and delivered a platform with a five fold increase in available content that improved key data capture metrics from by 80% within 6 months of operation.

Mobile messaging and performance communication platform serving some of the UK’s biggest brands (Caffè Nero, Next, Brewdog, VisionExpress, Revere)

Core member of the executive team who led product development and played a key role in the company’s operations and strategy.

From joining as a Developer at this startup’s earliest stage to leading engineering and customer ops as the Product and Technical Director, my contributions to the codebase, product, business operations, and direction of the company exemplify my strategic, cross functional, process minded, and outcome driven approach.

2021–2023Engineering and Product Director

  • Played a key role in the company’s sale via acquisition by Sona (backed by Google Ventures.)Prepared investor slide decks, met with potential acquirers, and fielded all technical due diligence requests.
  • Defined product roadmap and ensured successful delivery of 100% of non-R&D projects.Undertook preliminary development work to uncover and remove unknowns. Provided comprehensive work specifications for new features and enhancements. Directed and reviewed team’s output to discover and eliminate blockers, make appropriate scope cuts when required, and keep work on track.
  • Transformed ‘feature factory’ development process to deliver new, supplementary, product in 3 months whilst maintaining existing product release cadence.Improved development processes, managed scope and resource constraints. Collaborated with and gained buy-in from other stakeholders. Contributed 25–50% of new MRR and demonstrated a positive return on investment for customers (a 5–10% increase in their revenue.)
  • Fostered a numbers based, product led, culture of transparency and accountability while working in close collaboration with the CEO.Standardised practices using the EOS/Traction model. Every employee made contributions to company-wide scorecards, gaining a sense of ownership and accountability. Product measures such as Weekly Active Users became our North Star. This focused the entire company on delivering improvements to the product and the customer experience.
  • Set and directed team KPIs which resulted in 50% reduction in support response times without adding personnel.Instilled a sense of ownership and accountability throughout my team giving them the confidence to initiate improvement projects. Supported and directed my team in improving efficiency and reducing causes of tickets.
  • Initiated and applied a quarterly performance review process that drove team engagement and growth.Delivered actionable and quantifiable insights into employee performance and career progress. Enabled clear goal setting for advancement and implemented evidence based Performance Improvement Plans which were adopted and standardised company-wide.

2020–2021Head of Engineering & Product

  • Helped enable the business to navigate the pandemic with increased productivity, cooperation, and focus.Trailblazed use of collaborative tools such as Asana and Notion. Set standards for successful, async first, remote working and collaboration. This centralised the company’s operations and knowledge, instilled a project minded, collaborative, and open approach to work, broke down silos, and fostered a documentation driven culture.
  • Grew the development team by 3x with 100% new hire retention.Implemented hiring framework which utilised core value and key attribute scoring to ensure culture fit and suitability of hires.
  • Led the ISO 27001 certification of engineering processes.Documented and ensured adherence to the processes required for certification within engineering. Certification enabled the company to sign contracts with some of the largest UK brands and multi-national organisations.
  • Facilitated the establishment of key partner integrations, relationships, and processes.Worked with external partners to understand their needs, provided technical direction and managed development of integration features. These efforts unlocked an additional £100,000 ARR via cross-sale opportunities.
  • Re-engineered the company’s push notification backend so that native mobile platform features were utilised.This transformed the feature from a frequent source of negative feedback to an indispensable part of the experience.
  • Designed and implemented a flexible data import facility.This drastically reduced the time and effort required to establish imports for new customers and reduced the manual overhead for workspace setup.
  1. 2018–2020Senior Developer & Team Lead
  2. 2017–2018Developer

Bespoke, subcontract, engineering firm serving industries such as nuclear, space, and automotive.

Implemented and maintained a modern Enterprise Resource Management system, defined best practices for its use, and developed custom modifications and supplementary software tools in order to maximise business efficiency and streamline operations.

  1. 2012—2017Business Systems Development Manager
  2. 2010—2012Technical Lead – Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Implementation
  3. 2007—2010IT Manager
  4. 2001—2007IT Technician

Education

As a highly self-driven learner I have pursued many subjects in and outside IT. At undergraduate level, through the Open University, I have studied:

Interests