Raf Gemmail

Technical leadership across large-scale SaaS platforms spanning loyalty, messaging and event-driven data systems.

• Lead distributed engineering teams across New Zealand and the Philippines delivering enterprise SaaS platforms used by global retail and hospitality brands.
• Responsible for reliability, delivery and technical evolution of a high-scale loyalty platform processing hundreds of millions of real-time POS and ecommerce events.
• Previously led engineering for the Sailthru messaging platform delivering billions of email, push, in-app and SMS messages weekly.
• Work closely with engineers on system design, architecture evolution and incident management across JVM-based services and polyglot platform components.
• Introduced engineering productivity measurement to quantify delivery friction across environments and developer workflows.
• Used these metrics to prioritise platform improvements reducing developer toil and improving delivery predictability.
• Led adoption of AI-assisted development workflows using Copilot, Cursor and Claude across engineering teams.
• Act as senior technical escalation point for enterprise customers and production incidents.

Stack: Java, Scala, Rails, Elixir, Go, Python • AWS (EKS, ECS, Lambda) • Kafka • Terraform • Datadog • MongoDB • Redis • Elasticsearch • DynamoDB • Databricks

Promoted internally from Head of Product to lead engineering and platform delivery for a global coding education organisation.

Scaled the organisation from single-digit cohorts to nearly 200 students while building the internal technology platform supporting global programmes.

• Led transition of internal systems toward a data-driven SaaS architecture using AWS and infrastructure-as-code.
• Implemented Terraform-based automation for internal systems including identity onboarding and platform provisioning.
• Created an NZQA-approved workplace technology qualification integrating real engineering delivery with training.
• Mentored and coached engineers and students in modern software engineering practices.

Seconded as Head of Technology for sister organisation Parasol, establishing enterprise delivery engagements.

• Authored the technical Statement of Work securing a multi-team engineering engagement with Northpower, a major New Zealand electricity provider.
• Embedded teams with enterprise architects and developers and led technical onboarding and delivery alignment.

Hands-on consulting role spanning DevOps, testing and delivery coaching for enterprise and government teams.

• Consulted on BDD and ATDD adoption, pairing with analysts and engineers to create self-validating specifications and stronger testing feedback loops.
• Built Spring Cloud Function and AWS Lambda prototypes while helping teams move away from monolithic patterns toward smaller, testable services.
• Used Concordion-based specification by example to connect business language, documentation and executable tests.
• Delivered remote coaching, workshops and technical enablement across DevOps, containerisation and engineering practice during the first COVID lockdown period.

Contracted as a hands-on technical and agile coach for a scaling product company working on an AWS, Java, Scala and Python stack.

• Split time between direct delivery and technical coaching, contributing to ad optimisation work across Spark, Storm, Spring Boot and Angular services.
• Ran test strategy workshops, domain modelling sessions and engineering coaching to help teams work through scale-up complexity and delivery risk.
• Worked with product owners and engineers on hypothesis-driven development and specification by example.
• Partnered with the incoming CTO on rebooting team working agreements, backlogs and Sprint Zero planning.