Hi, I’m Hemant :)

A techie based in Manchester. Working in technology for over 15 years, I care about how software is built, who builds it, and its potential to improve lives.

Be it building products, Data and AI strategy, or just helping engineering teams ship with confidence, I believe in keeping things simple, delivering value quickly and creating environments where people feel supported and inspired.

At the summit of Snowdon, Wales

What I do

I currently head up R&D at Finova, where we’re building the next generation of AI-enabled broker and mortgage lending products. Building SaaS products is where I’ve spent most of my career. At Kalibrate I worked on retail fuel price optimisation - classical ML, back before AI was fashionable or SageMaker and Vertex existed. I helped turn those pricing and data science services into a multi-tenant SaaS platform. Running CPU-hungry R workloads on Kubernetes was tricky but fun. At BeyondTrust I helped take its privileged access management product to the cloud as a SaaS platform for Fortune 500 customers.

I’ve also spent time on the other side of the table, consulting at Thoughtworks and more recently Accenture, helping organisations across financial services, the public sector and healthcare modernise technology and build engineering and data teams. At Accenture that meant guiding client executives through modernisation, data and tech strategy, and running a security community of practice to develop cybersecurity skills across Accenture UK engineering.

Both sides have taught me how to get teams delivering at pace while keeping governance and security front of mind, and left me with one conviction: you can’t build what’s next on a platform or a culture stuck in the past.

I’m interested in creating environments where experimentation, learning, curiosity and a bit of bravery are encouraged - spaces where it’s safe to ask questions and push boundaries. Where “that’s how it’s always worked” is a red flag, not a reason. I like keeping up with what’s new, but I pick technology because the evidence says it solves a problem, not because it’s on a conference slide. I also write and speak about designing, testing and securing software. Amidst rambling about stuff I also manage to ship some code, though these days Claude and its ilk do most of the typing while I steer and review. It’s all on my GitHub page - a bunch of things, from open source contributions to what I am currently learning and experimenting with.

Beyond work

When not at work - cricket, yoga and the outdoors keep me occupied. These days my musings are mostly tech and science - I have an amateur’s love of physics - and philosophy, especially Indian philosophy, which I read and think about more deeply than anyone asked me to. Some of it finds its way onto X and into this space too.