Raf Gemmail

Raf Gemmail

Lean-Engineering Leader & Coach — Dev no.4 at Booking.com; Ex-BBC iPlayer, Morgan Stanley

Empowering teams to deliver impactful, lasting products.

Professional Summary

Hands-on, transformational engineering leader, rich in experience at scale, with a passion for polyglot development, cloud-native architecture, DevOps, data & AI, and creating engineering cultures.

I thrive working directly with engineers — designing, coding, debugging, pairing, coaching — and enjoy building fast learning loops, running product experiments, and applying FinOps to balance cost and delivery. Comfortable operating across C-suite strategy, vendor partnerships and day-to-day incident collaboration. Experienced in polyglot stacks and performance-sensitive systems across fintech, martech, media and large SaaS platforms.

I deliver lasting impacts through feedback loops, data insights, a shared mission and the empowerment of engineering teams.

Community & Speaking

A sample of public content and community contributions (some of my InfoQ and community work):

Professional Experience

  • Senior Director of Engineering March 2025 – Present
    Marigold Loyalty
    • Head of engineering leadership assumed from a departing VP, for a Forrester-recognised loyalty platform — driving a multi-region high-performance product & serving global retail & hospitality brands.
    • Led ~40–50 engineers & managers and leads across across NZ & Philippines; created Staff+ innovation team and ran Gen-AI assisted development experiments during hackdays.
    • Championing shifting left and right, SRE-collaboration, security by design, petabyte data pipelines and POS/ecommerce integrations; coached leads on measurement (cost, reliability, delivery) and waste capture.
    • C-suite collaboration, as well as client and internal stake-holder engagement.
    • Experience: Java, Scala, Rails, Python, AWS (EKS/ECS/Lambda), Kafka, Terraform, Databricks, CI/CD, BDD, Observability (Datadog), AI tooling, SOC 1/2, various bigdata and rdbms
  • Director of Engineering — Platform Capabilities July 2024 – March 2025
    Marigold / Sailthru
    • Oversaw UI, Mobile Push, Data Engineering and Core Platform teams across multiple time zones; introduced hybrid ShapeUp + Big Room planning for prioritisation.
    • Optimised petabyte-scale data workflows and drove FinOps to reduce cloud costs while improving reliability.
    • Experience: Java, Python, node, AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Kafka, Spark, SQL/Redshift/Databricks, CI/CD, SOC/HiTrust, postgres, mongo
  • Engineering Manager — Mobile Messaging & Platform/SRE Teams July 2022 – July 2024
    Marigold / Sailthru
    • Directly managed and contributed to two cross-functional platform teams delivering billions of email/push/in-app messages per week for enterprise customers.
    • Accountable for availability, cost management, incident response (PagerDuty) and DevEx improvements; mentored ICs into leadership roles.
    • Experience: Rails, Elixir, Java, ECS/EKS, Kafka, AMQ, Terraform, Docker, CI/CD, Datadog, BDD, mongo/atlas, postgres, DynamoDB
  • Head of Technology (promoted from Head of Product) November 2020 – July 2022
    Developers Institute
    • Hired, designed courses, designed teaching solutions and scaled a cloud-native edtech startup from single-digit to hundreds of learners; designed NZQA-accredited pathways and work-based training partnerships.
    • Architected secure, data-driven SaaS (Python & AWS), recruited/mentored tech leads, and ran product experiments & focus groups.
    • Deployed and guided contractor teams for clients (including Northpower), and wrote SOWs during secondment to our contracting entity.
    • Experience: Python, AWS, Terraform, Lambda, Postgres, CI/CD, BDD/ATDD, Agile coaching, mongo
  • Senior Technical Consultant (DevOps) February 2020 – November 2020
    Assurity Consulting (clients incl. NZQA)
    • Consulted on DevOps & BDD; coached ATDD and paired with BAs to write self-validating BDD requirements; built AWS serverless prototypes.
    • Experience: Java, Spring Cloud Functions, AWS (Lambda, API GW), Concordion, ATDD, CI/CD
  • Contract — Agile & DevOps Coach Nov 2019 – Feb 2020
    NZTA
    • Coached leadership & teams through cultural change and vendor-trust issues; supported Azure/ADO delivery improvements on large public programmes.
    • Experience: Azure DevOps, Angular, C#, Kanban, Lean, Agile coaching, leadership facilitation
  • Remote Computer Science Professor (contract) 2019 – 2022
    OpenClassrooms (remote NZ & Paris)
    • Authored and filmed undergraduate modules: ATDD in Java, Debugging, Modern Java Concurrency, Building REST APIs with Spring Data; designed assessments and real-world projects.
    • Experience: Java, Spring, ATDD, TDD, Concurrency, REST APIs, teaching & curriculum design
  • Lead Eng and Agile & Technical Consultant Jun 2018 – Jan 2019
    MPorium (London)
    • Stepped in during CTO absence as hands on contributor, faciltator and lead; coached teams, contributed code to an ML powered ad-bidding product, demystified Spark via mob-programming, and helped recruit a permanent CTO.
    • Experience: Scala, Spark, Python, ML pipelines, Agile coaching, mob programming
  • Technical Design Lead Jan 2018 – Jun 2018
    Bank of New Zealand
    • Led strangler pattern from JEE monolith to microservices, ran DDD workshops and improved mobile CI/security practices.
    • Experience: Java, JEE, Spring, Redshift, CI/CD, DDD, event-driven design
  • Technical Coach & Lead May 2015 – Jan 2018
    Stuff.co.nz / Fairfax Media
    • Coached teams across JVM/JS stacks; championed mob programming, trunk-based development, CI/CD, and an experimentation culture for high-traffic news systems.
    • Experience: Java, Node.js, AWS (ECS, Lambda), Serverless, CI/CD, BDD, Mob programming
  • Solutions Architect & Iteration Master Oct 2013 – May 2015
    Catalyst IT
    • BDD-focused solution design; collaborated with Spotify Partner API and led agile delivery on a sizeable government programme (~40 ICs + BAs + testers).
    • Experience: Java, Node, BDD, AWS, Microservices, Agile facilitation, CI/CD
  • Senior Software Engineer (contract) Apr 2013 – Oct 2013
    BBC iPlayer
    • Rapid delivery of business-critical Java microservices; migrated legacy Perl microservices to Spring & Apache Camel on AWS using BDD methodologies.
    • Experience: Java, Spring, Apache Camel, Perl, AWS, BDD, CI/CD
  • Contract Senior Software Engineer Jan 2012 – Apr 2013
    Headforwards / NTT
    • Architected parts of NTT's enterprise cloud solution, and led TDD practice; delivered automated pipelines for cloud VM images and services.
    • Experience: Java, Perl, Python testing, TDD, Cloud automation, Jenkins, Linux
  • Contract Senior Software Engineer Oct 2010 – Jan 2012
    BBC iPlayer
    • Performance optimisation of high-traffic services; built versioned REST APIs and visualised metrics to enable continuous delivery.
    • Experience: Java, Perl, Performance tuning, REST APIs, memcache, webscale, ops, CI/CD, monitoring
  • Contract Senior Software Engineer Jul 2009 – Oct 2010
    Trinity Mirror Digital Recruitment
    • Architected and optimised a large job-board platform; performance tuned Apache Lucene indexes and rewrote major components to improve throughput and reliability. Began migration from perl to spring framework.
    • Experience: Java, Lucene, MySQL, Perl, Spring, Performance tuning
  • Software Engineer Aug 2007 – Jul 2009
    Morgan Stanley (Securities Reference Data)
    • Designed high-performance ETL services for market reference & timeseries data; refactored caching managers and promoted TDD practices across the team.
    • Experience: Java, Sybase, MQ, C, Perl, Benchmarking, TDD, Sybase, DB2
  • Software Engineer Nov 2006 – Aug 2007
    VisionOSS
    • Refactored C/Perl CMDB code for Cisco VoIP configuration; implemented batch queue engine in C with perl web UIs for device configuration.
    • Experience: C, Perl, PostgreSQL, SOAP, CGI, XS, C# (testing), VoIP integration
  • Senior Asset Control Developer Feb 2005 – Nov 2006
    Abbey Financial Markets / Santander
    • Built high-performance message-oriented middleware and APIs to support traders; wrapped C APIs for Perl clients and implemented XML schemas + real-time notifiers.
    • Experience: Perl (Inline::C), C, J2EE/JSP/JMS/MQ, XML, SOAP, Swing, Sybase
  • Experienced Software Engineer Feb 2003 – Feb 2005
    ING Bank (Global Market Database)
    • Developed event-driven corporate actions applications and timeseries tooling; created Perl/Java/C++ integrations and graphical tools for front-office workflows. Delivered YAPC-Paris talk on Inline C.
    • Experience: Perl, C++, Java, SOAP, XML, Sybase, mod_perl, libgd
  • Senior Software Engineer (Developer #4) Feb 2002 – Feb 2003
    Booking.com / Bookings.nl
    • Hired by Booking's founder. Refactored legacy Perl systems to OO design; normalised databases and implemented a next-gen MVC architecture for bookings.
    • Experience: Perl, PostgreSQL, Template Toolkit, mod_perl, MySQL, FreeBSD
  • Software Engineer & Systems Administrator Jan 2001 – Feb 2002
    Codix.net Ltd
    • Sysadmin for client servers and in-house hosting; bespoke mod_perl development and templating for customer projects.
    • Experience: FreeBSD, Solaris, Apache, mod_perl, MySQL, XSLT, Perl
  • Junior Software Engineer Feb 2000 – Jan 2001
    Sportingbet.com
    • Worked on internationalisation, statistical betting engines and interactive TV/web applications; early production experience of high-throughput transactional systems.
    • Experience: Perl, CGI, MySQL, Apache, I18N, Interactive TV

Examples of Skills & Capabilities

Education & Certifications

BSc (Hons) Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence
University of Birmingham
1994 – 1999
Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa (1997–1998)
ICP-ACC — ICAgile Certified Professional (Agile Coaching)
Trained by Shane Hastie (ICAgile)
2016

Interests

Homeschooling dad passionate about science & futurism . Amateur astronomer, coastal runner. Lifelong musician (guitar & ukulele) . Tinkering with VR, OSS AI models, video transcoding & NixOS in spare time.