I build the search and recommendation platforms behind BBC products.

Technical product manager, currently working on the BBC’s recommendations and data science platform. Before that, a search engineer, and a computing lecturer before that.

About

I lead product strategy for the BBC’s central search and recommendation platforms, which support several audience-facing products. My route here was through engineering: I spent six years building software at the BBC, from iPlayer on TV to the search infrastructure itself, so I’m comfortable in the details of how these systems work.

I work across data science, engineering and product teams to turn platform services into reusable capabilities. That means clear evaluation frameworks, secure experimentation environments, and a habit of talking to the people who use the platform every day.

Before technology, I taught computing for nearly a decade and led the department. It still shapes how I explain complicated things to people.

Impact

52M
Queries handled in one quarter by “Results as You Type” for BBC Sport, across web and mobile.
10.6%
Increase in active accounts that the Sport search work contributed to.
28%
Fewer spelling corrections after launching cross-platform query autocompletion.
17%
Fewer “no results” queries from the same autocompletion work.

Experience

BBC

April 2026 to present

Product Manager, Recommendations & Data Science Platform

Secure ML infrastructure & data privacy. Partnered with security and engineering teams so experimentation workflows and model training environments meet strict PII access controls and data exfiltration prevention standards.
Platform as a product. Led continuous discovery through user journey mapping and interviews with internal data scientists, to find workflow bottlenecks, remove boilerplate overhead and keep to platform security policies.
MLOps & best practices. Enabled MLflow integration within the Data Science Experimentation Environment, standardising model tracking while improving operational visibility and compliance tracking across data science teams.
Pipeline infrastructure & benchmarking. Shaping the H2 roadmap to remove environment parity issues, by evaluating automated deployment tooling against platforms such as Spotify Backstage and Hugging Face.

BBC

October 2021 to April 2026

Product Manager, Search

Led product strategy and delivery for the BBC’s central Search and Recommendation platforms, working with Machine Learning Enablement, Enterprise Data and engineering teams to turn platform services into scalable, reusable product capabilities.

Search & intent optimisation. Led discovery and delivery of cross-platform query autocompletion, reducing spelling corrections by 28% and “no results” queries by 17% while capturing high-intent behavioural signals.
Engagement & growth. Delivered “Results as You Type” for Sport on web and mobile, handling over 52M queries in Q1 and contributing to a 10.6% increase in active accounts.
Experimentation infrastructure. Co-founded the strategy for the central Data Science Experimentation Environment, establishing standard evaluation frameworks across relevance, click-through and conversion rates.
Operating model transformation. Clarified the boundary between platform capabilities and customer-facing experience teams, reducing duplicated engineering effort and speeding up delivery across ML and data pipelines.

BBC

August 2019 to September 2021

Software Engineer, Search & Navigation

Built frontend, backend and data pipeline solutions for the core search infrastructure, focused on low latency, relevance and reliability.

Search schemas & pipelines. Designed search schemas, index-time and query-time analysers, and ETL pipelines in Java and JavaScript to extend data structures and relevance capabilities.
Client-facing APIs. Built Java APIs that expose modern search engine features directly to product experience teams.
Curated search indexes. Developed internal tools for editorially curated indexes, balancing algorithmic retrieval with domain curation.

BBC

November 2017 to August 2019

Junior Software Engineer, iPlayer TV

Delivered full-stack software and experimentation tooling for BBC iPlayer on TV platforms, in production CI/CD environments using Node.js, React, Java, AWS and Docker.

Multivariate testing. Implemented Optimizely full-stack multivariate testing across interactive TV applications to validate feature hypotheses.
Catalogue pipelines & observability. Built third-party catalogue API transformation pipelines and CloudWatch dashboards for real-time operational visibility.

St Helens College & Cronton Sixth Form College

January 2008 to November 2017

Programme Leader & Lecturer, Computing

Leading the computing programme. Led post-16 computing curriculum planning, team delivery and awarding body compliance, with 96% student retention and 90% achievement.
Designing degree pathways. Co-designed higher education pathways, including an FdSc Computing validation with UCLAN and a Games Programming curriculum.

Skills

Platform strategy & infrastructure: Platform as a service, API design, microservices, reusable capabilities, developer experience, internal developer platforms.
Data governance & compliance: Data privacy and PII handling, access control management, data exfiltration prevention, privacy-compliant ML workflows, secure experimentation environments built on least privilege.
ML infrastructure & MLOps: Machine learning recommendations, MLflow integration, data science experimentation environments, workflow standardisation, CI/CD and pipeline automation.
Discovery & personalisation: Qualitative user research, user journey mapping, competitor analysis, vector search, behavioural data, personalisation at scale.
Data & experimentation: A/B and multivariate testing, evaluation frameworks, relevance metrics, conversion rate optimisation, behavioural analytics.
Leadership & execution: Cross-functional team alignment, continuous discovery, double-diamond methodology, OKRs, PRFAQ authoring.

Education

2025Reforge Product Foundations Program
2022Search with Machine Learning, co:rise
2013BSc (Hons) Applied Computing, Sheffield Hallam University
2012Oracle Database Design and Programming with SQL (teacher), Royal High School, Edinburgh
2010Diploma in Teaching in the Lifelong Learning Sector, Liverpool John Moores University

Projects

Delerier: A prototype developed in Godot, exploring agentic game development.
Toy Racer VR: Experimenting with cost effective browser based VR environments.

Working on search, recommendations or ML platforms? Let’s talk.

I’m based in St Helens, in the north west of England. Email is the quickest way to reach me.

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