Richard Parkins

Security & Risk

Secure-by-design delivery across cloud platforms and distributed systems.

• OWASP-aligned engineering, threat modelling, and practical security controls
• Identity, RBAC/PIM, secrets management and audit readiness
• Operational security: monitoring, alerting, incident learning

Architecture Governance

Lightweight governance that improves consistency without slowing delivery.

• Architecture reviews, ADRs, service cataloguing and standards
• API-first practices (OpenAPI), versioning, and contract testing
• Data governance: PII/GDPR workflows and retention

Engineering Leadership

Building and scaling teams; enabling engineering excellence across squads and suppliers.

• Org design, hiring, mentoring, performance and career frameworks
• Ways of working, quality bars and operational ownership
• Communities of practice and cross-team alignment

Programme & Stakeholder Leadership

Translating technical trade-offs into decisions; managing dependencies and delivery risk.

• Executive comms, assurance and governance forum leadership
• Prioritisation, dependency mapping and risk mitigation
• Supplier engagement and technical due diligence

Cloud Platforms

Resilient cloud-native platforms with strong foundations and automation.

• Azure & AWS platform patterns: identity, networking, scaling and resilience
• IaC and CI/CD enablement; secure landing zones and guardrails
• Observability and reliability engineering (SLO thinking)

Integration & Distributed Systems

API-led and event-driven architectures that support autonomy and throughput.

• REST APIs, messaging/eventing, and integration patterns
• Microservices and pragmatic modernisation strategies
• Production readiness: testing, monitoring and operational playbooks

AI Service Catalogue Generation

Designing and building a production-oriented Microsoft Foundry platform of specialised Python hosted agents. It analyses source repositories, generates a searchable service catalogue covering C4 architecture, APIs, events, data and dependencies, then raises governed pull requests so the catalogue evolves with the codebase.

The challenge

Architecture documentation such as API specifications, database models and system diagrams is valuable but expensive to maintain manually. It quickly becomes incomplete or stale across a large engineering estate, reducing confidence in service discovery, governance and change impact analysis.

The solution

A composable multi-agent architecture hosted in Microsoft Foundry. Deterministic discovery agents identify bounded source evidence, model-backed generator agents transform that evidence into structured artefacts, workflow agents coordinate the process, and dedicated publisher agents commit validated outputs through GitHub pull requests.

Generated service catalogue

• APIs: generates OpenAPI 3.1 specifications from API and supporting DTO source files
• Events and commands: catalogues messaging contracts, publishers, consumers and handlers
• C4 architecture: produces evidence-backed system, container and component representations
• Data: extracts database tables, columns, relationships, indexes and named types
• Service dependencies: maps outbound HTTP and gRPC integrations without exposing secret values
• Uses manifest commit hashes to process only changed repositories and combine successful outputs into a governed pull request

Engineering approach

• Separates deterministic source discovery, AI-assisted generation, orchestration and repository mutation into independently deployable hosted agents
• Applies bounded inputs, schema validation, controlled concurrency and fail-closed workflow behaviour
• Uses workload identity and role separation so only publisher agents receive GitHub write credentials
• Deploys Python 3.13 services through Azure Developer CLI and GitHub Actions using the Foundry agent runtime and Responses protocol
• Supports unit-tested agent components, independent deployment and incremental pipeline evolution

Technology

Python, Microsoft Foundry hosted agents, Azure AI Projects, Azure Identity, agent-to-agent orchestration, structured model outputs, GitHub APIs, GitHub Actions, Azure Developer CLI, JSON Schema, OpenAPI and C4 modelling.

View the source-control agent pipelines on GitHub

Technical Director / Head of Architecture

Built and led a permanent engineering and architecture capability, scaling delivery across public sector programmes.

• Architecture leadership and assurance for national-scale services (primarily Azure, with AWS experience)
• Set standards: reference architectures, governance, and communities of practice
• Stakeholder management across senior governance, delivery leads and suppliers

Staff Engineer / Lead Architect

Architectural and technical leadership for a high-throughput pricing and quoting platform, modernised to a scalable microservice estate on AWS.

• Led governance across services (standards, reusable libraries, contract testing)
• Improved delivery and resilience through CI/CD, observability and platform patterns
• Mentored tech leads and engineers; shaped technical strategy and delivery alignment

Senior Consultant / Lead Developer

Delivered platform and product capabilities across enterprise and consumer-facing environments, focusing on secure delivery, performance and reliability.

Founder / Director

Founded and delivered bespoke software products and services for private clients; end-to-end ownership from solution design to delivery and support.

Software Engineer

Developed mobile and web applications, messaging systems and supporting tooling in a large-scale enterprise environment.

Loughborough University