Richard Parkins

Director-level technology leader with 30+ years’ experience across hands-on engineering, solution/platform architecture and senior leadership. I design and deliver secure, cloud-native digital services at scale across public sector and high-throughput commercial environments.

I specialise in pragmatic architecture, delivery acceleration and building high-performing teams. Comfortable moving from deep technical design reviews to executive governance, assurance, and stakeholder management.

Recent focus: Azure/AWS platform foundations, API-led and event-driven integration, modernisation of legacy estates, and improving reliability, observability and engineering standards while reducing operational friction.


Skills

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

Experience

Technical Director / Head of Architecture

Talent Consulting

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
Oct 2020 - Present

Staff Engineer / Lead Architect

CompareTheMarket

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
Aug 2016 - Oct 2020

Senior Consultant / Lead Developer

Various (CTM, EasyJet, Tesco, Cambridge University)

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

2008 - 2016

Founder / Director

TouchScreenData.com

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

2003 - 2008

Software Engineer

Thomson Reuters

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

2000 - 2003

Education

Loughborough University

BEng (Hons) Electrical & Electronic Engineering
1st Class honours
1990 - 1994

Interests

Football, tennis, fishing on the broads, family time and films. Chess when the weather’s doing its usual British thing.