Raf Gemmail

Raf Gemmail

Scaling SaaS platforms & leading globally distributed teams
Ex-Booking.com, BBC iPlayer, Morgan Stanley

Summary

Engineering Leader with proven success scaling high-growth SaaS platforms and leading globally distributed teams. I specialise in building resilient, cost-effective systems while fostering high-performance engineering cultures.

Currently leading ~50 engineers across the Philippines and NZ. I bring hands-on expertise in cloud architecture, DevOps transformation, and high performance product delivery. I am passionate about mentorship and growth. My own leadership style balances technical depth with business impact - I am equally comfortable cutting code or driving technical strategy, as I am enabling business partners at all levels.

Thought Leadership & Community

Regular contributor to engineering community through conferences and podcasts:

Leadership Experience

  • Senior Director of Engineering March 2025 – Present
    Marigold Loyalty (Remote NZ with teams in the Philippines)
    • Leading engineering org for a (Forrester-wave) leading loyalty platform, serving global brands
    • Heading up a 50 engineer org with multiple teams on AWS hosted stacks ranging from Rails to Scala
    • Driving technical strategy for high-scale POS and ecommerce integrations
    • Mentoring and establishing a culture of security, sre and cross-silo collaboration within eng leadership team
    • Invited into a, C-suite coached, SLT program focused on ELT-level challenges
    • Introduced AI, Eng Productivity, Functional programming and other guilds
  • Director of Engineering (Platform Capabilities) July 2024 - March 2025
    Marigold Sailthru (Remote NZ with teams in India, Philippines, US, NZ)
    • Oversaw platform engineering including UI, Mobile Push, Data Engineering, and Platform
    • Led migration from managed services to internal platform capabilities
    • Established engineering practices for distributed teams across multiple time zones
    • Drove cost optimisation and reliability for petabyte-scale data platforms
  • Engineering Manager July 2022 - July 2024
    Marigold Sailthru (Remote NZ with teams in NZ, US and India)
    • Led Platform and Mobile Messaging teams delivering billions of messages monthly
    • Hands-on leadership with ECS/EKS/Kafka/AMQ/Rails/Elixir/Java services
    • Implemented data-driven leadership using cost, delivery, and reliability metrics
    • Active participant in PagerDuty rotation and incident management
  • Head of Technology (and formerly Head of Product) November 2020 - July 2022
    Developers Institute
    • Led scale-up from single-digit to hundreds of learners with cloud-native SaaS platforms
    • Architected and delivered AWS-based platforms and IT infra with security by design
    • Managed full technology stack, from product development to enterprise IT
    • Recruited, mentored, and developed technical leadership and early teaching teams
    • Designed NZQA-approved vocational pathways for learners from diverse backgrounds

Technical Leadership & Engineering

  • Hands-on Technical Consultant & Agile Coach Roles 2019 - 2020
    Companies: Assurity Consulting, NZTA, MPorium
    • DevOps coaching and BDD consulting for government and enterprise clients
    • Led AWS serverless implementations and ML stack development
    • Agile transformation coaching for distributed teams
  • Technical Lead & Architect Roles 2013 - 2018
    Companies: BNZ, Stuff.co.nz, Catalyst IT
    • Microservices migrations and cloud-native platform development
    • Technical coaching and team leadership for high-traffic platforms
    • DDD workshops and event storming for complex domain modeling
    • Led Agile delivery of Cabnet legislative-workflow for NZ Government
  • Senior Software Engineer Roles 2002 - 2015
    Companies: BBC iPlayer, Morgan Stanley, ING, Booking.com
    • High-performance systems development for webscale platforms
    • Platform optimisation and scalable architecture design
    • Early adopter of cloud technologies and DevOps practices
  • Software Engineer Roles 1999 - 2007
    Companies: Codix.net, Sportingbet.com, VisionOSS, Santander
    • Full-stack development and systems administration for commercial applications
    • Early career experience across financial services, gaming, and web platforms

Skills & Capabilities

Education & Certifications

BSc Hon. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
University of Birmingham and University of Pisa
1994 - 1999
ICP-ACC ICAgile Certified Professional - Agile Coaching
Trained by Shane Hastie, Director of Learning at ICAgile
2016

Interests

Homeschooling dad passionate about science and futurism. Amateur astronomer and outdoor jogger. Lifelong musician playing guitar and ukulele. Exploring VR, oss AI models, video transcoding and NixOS in my spare time.