Richard Parkins

Executive Profile

Senior technology leader with 30+ years of experience spanning hands-on software engineering, enterprise and solution architecture, and Director-level leadership. Proven track record designing and delivering secure, cloud-native platforms at national scale while building and leading high-performing engineering organisations. Known for combining deep technical credibility with pragmatic leadership, product innovation and commercial delivery, operating comfortably from code and architecture reviews through to executive governance and board-level discussion. Experienced in building and scaling engineering organisations, establishing governance frameworks, technology standards, learning pathways and engineering operating models that improve delivery capability, consistency and long-term organisational maturity.

Technical Skills & Tooling

Detailed, resource-level experience across cloud platforms, data stores, integration patterns, delivery pipelines, security controls and operational tooling.

Professional Experience

Technical Director / Head of Engineering, Talent Consulting (2021–Present)

Technology and delivery consultancy (part of Swipejobs group), operating primarily in UK public sector. Principal client: Department for Education, £58bn+ annual budget, 337,000+ apprenticeship starts per year across 76,000+ employer organisations.

• Built and led a multidisciplinary team of 10 engineering, delivery and business specialists across three client contracts, achieving consistently positive client feedback while maintaining delivery focus across architecture, engineering, DevOps and QA.
• Introduced career pathways aligned to the Government Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) framework, supported by performance planning, mentoring, succession planning and structured development routes for technical team members.
• Created the interview and assessment strategy for permanent technical hires, ensuring candidates demonstrated the right technical capability, delivery mindset and commitment to Talent's collaborative consultancy culture.
• Introduced Confluence and Slack as core collaboration platforms, then automated team workflows using Slack alerts for training requests, recruitment pipeline updates and operational notifications across Google Forms, Trello and internal processes.
• Established a weekly technical Community of Practice, bringing new technologies, AI developments and delivery lessons into the team, with a rotating chair model to give team members experience leading technical discussion.
• Planned and facilitated quarterly face-to-face team events in partnership with Sales and Operations Directors, using team input to shape sessions around technical growth, delivery improvement and commercial priorities.
• Established engineering governance and standards across architecture, software development, data and AI, improving consistency of delivery, assurance and technical decision-making across client engagements.
• Introduced the Microsoft Partner Programme for Talent, driving Azure, AI and data certification pathways to strengthen capability, partner alignment and market credibility.
• Created a three-year technical department business plan focused on AI, data, acquisition strategy and growth of the existing team, securing board agreement and progressing implementation across training, salary banding, performance plans and career pathways.
• Contributed to securing approximately £40m of contracted revenue over four years through technical proposition development, executive relationships, public sector bid responses and hands-on support to sales teams developing new client relationships.
• Conceived, designed and delivered an AI-powered bid management platform integrating tender ingestion, bid response library search, ChatGPT-style querying, task management and response workflow from draft through review, red review and submission readiness; reduced manual bid-management effort by approximately 50%.
• Created operational processes for managing bid contributors, consultants, permanent team members, actions and response ownership, while updating the bid knowledge library with successful submissions to improve future response quality.
• Represented Talent in senior stakeholder forums, including presenting the technical capability and operating model to the CEO of the acquiring company and coordinating technical insight sessions with key clients to add value beyond delivery commitments.
• Principal Architect across DfE programmes, providing hands-on architecture leadership and assurance from discovery through to live, and presenting strategy, trade-offs and risk at Deputy Director-level governance forums.
• Led and presented a cross-tenant Identity & Access Management security review across the DfE Azure estate (seven tenants spanning Education.gov.uk, CIP and ESFA), identifying inconsistent joiner/mover/leaver processes, overly permissive access and fragmented governance; quantified the security, financial and reputational risk and proposed a unified-identity target model aligned to the Common Platform Components/Platform Simplification Project to senior stakeholders.
• Guested in ad-hoc mentoring sessions with DfE apprentices, sharing career experience and the pathway from engineering into technical leadership and directorship.
• Managed sensitive people leadership responsibilities including disciplinary matters, performance issues and redundancy consultations with fairness, structure and alignment to business needs.

Lead Architect, Apprenticeships Service, DfE (2023–Present)

National apprenticeship services supporting employers, providers, apprentices and government users across the apprenticeship lifecycle.

• Lead Architect for the Apprenticeships Service, providing technical direction, architectural assurance and delivery support across nationally significant public sector services.
• Defined and governed target architectures covering identity, integration, service boundaries, data flows, operational tooling and platform resilience across Azure-hosted services.
• Worked across multidisciplinary delivery teams, senior DfE stakeholders and supplier partners to align architectural decisions with policy intent, delivery priorities and long-term service sustainability.
• Embedded secure-by-design and GDS-aligned delivery practices through design reviews, ADRs, risk management, technical governance and clear communication of trade-offs at senior forums.

Principal Architect, CPD & Family Hubs, DfE (2021–2023)

CPD services reach teachers and school leaders across thousands of English institutions; Family Hubs supports vulnerable families across dozens of local authority areas.

• Architectural owner for both programmes, defined target architectures covering identity, API-led integration, data flows, and operational tooling aligned to GDS standards and DfE enterprise patterns.
• Coordinated architectural decisions across an 18-team agile delivery model, including service boundaries, data ownership, and supplier integration patterns.
• Embedded security-by-design (IAM, network segmentation, secrets management, audit readiness) across services subject to government security classification and public data obligations.
• Guided services through discovery, alpha, beta, and live phases via design reviews, ADRs, and delivery assurance; communicated trade-offs and risk to senior DfE stakeholders.

Applications Architect, Comparethemarket (2017–2021)

UK’s most recognised price comparison platform (87% brand awareness); 7+ million customers; BGL Group revenues exceeding £700m per annum. Customer base grew 12%+ year-on-year during tenure.

• Architectural owner for the core Pricing Platform and partner risk services, led multi-year decomposition of a high-traffic on-premises monolith into AWS microservices using API-led and event-driven patterns.
• Introduced resilience engineering (circuit breakers, bulkhead isolation, automated failover), observability (distributed tracing, structured logging), and consumer-driven contract testing, reducing incident detection from days to minutes.
• Drove deployment frequency from monthly to daily; introduced automated security scanning; raised security baseline across an FCA-relevant platform.
• Mentored senior engineers and tech leads; chaired cross-team technical forums across multiple delivery squads.

Consultant Developer, Tesco Entertainment & EasyJet (2015–2017)

Consecutive contract engineering roles across two high-traffic UK consumer platforms: Tesco Entertainment (one of the UK’s leading digital entertainment retailers, part of a grocery group with ~27% UK market share) and EasyJet (Europe’s second-largest budget airline, ~74 million passengers annually).

• Tesco Entertainment: Delivered the “was/now/save” price cross-out feature across ~400,000 products to live release, maintained the Endeca search service powering entertainment discovery, and developed a conceptual Android MP3 purchase and download app (Java) alongside ongoing .NET platform delivery.
• EasyJet: Built customer-facing seat selection on Azure (MVC + KnockoutJS) as part of the booking journey used by tens of millions of travellers per year, and engineered an Azure Service Bus integration for real-time Pluscard validation via REST API, including a PHP client for third-party compatibility.

Director, TouchScreenData Ltd (2004–2015)

Independently founded technology consultancy, eleven years delivering bespoke digital platforms across retail, charity, and consumer sectors.

• Designed and built a greenfield online marketplace for the UK antiques sector (estimated £1bn+ annual market value) using .NET; delivered LAMP projects for clients including Coca-Cola and Children’s Trust.
• Operated as both technical lead and business owner across the full project lifecycle, from client engagement through to delivery.

Education

BEng (Hons) Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Loughborough University (First Class)

Projects

DfE Azure Estate, Identity & Access Management Security Review (2022)

A cross-tenant security and governance review of identity and access management across the DfE Azure estate, presented to senior stakeholders with a strategic remediation roadmap.

• Reviewed access management practices across seven DfE Azure tenants (Education.gov.uk, CIP, and ESFA’s CDS, TDA, PDP, NAS and FCS platforms), identifying inconsistent joiner/mover/leaver processes, overly permissive access, absent Privileged Identity Management and fragmented naming conventions.
• Quantified the resulting financial exposure (duplicated licensing and tooling, siloed teams performing similar processes manually) and reputational risk (data-breach and regulatory-fine exposure, inconsistent user experience, loss of institutional knowledge from contractor turnover).
• Proposed a unified-identity target model, consolidating the seven tenants into the core DfE education tenant, covering consistent provisioning/deprovisioning, harmonised MFA, consistent role and Privileged Identity Management, and common audit patterns.
• Aligned the recommendation to the Common Platform Components/Platform Simplification Project and presented findings, risk and next steps to senior DfE leadership to secure commitment, prioritisation and dedicated ownership.

Bid Intelligence Platform, AI-Powered Tender Management (2025–2026)

Conceived, designed and launched an AI-powered SaaS platform that brings tender discovery, qualification, response development, evidence retrieval and submission governance into one workflow.

• Defined the product vision, platform architecture, delivery roadmap and rollout strategy for adoption across Talent Consulting and the wider Swipejobs group.
• Integrated tender ingestion, bid response library search, ChatGPT-style querying, task management and controlled progression from initial draft through review, red review and submission readiness.
• Used Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Search, Document Intelligence and retrieval-augmented generation to ground responses in approved organisational evidence and previous successful submissions.
• Introduced automated compliance assessment, knowledge retrieval and bid-scoring workflows to support faster qualification and more consistent bid decisions.
• Created operational processes for contributors, consultants, actions, response ownership and continuous improvement of the reusable bid knowledge library.
• Reduced manual bid-management effort by approximately 50% while improving visibility, evidence reuse and workflow governance.

AI Service Catalogue Generation, Microsoft Foundry Hosted Agents (2026–Present)

A production-oriented platform of specialised Python hosted agents that analyses source repositories and keeps governed architecture documentation aligned with the codebase.

• Designed a composable multi-agent architecture separating deterministic source discovery, AI-assisted generation, workflow orchestration and GitHub pull-request publication into independently deployable services.
• Generates OpenAPI 3.1 specifications for APIs; catalogues events, commands, publishers, consumers and handlers; and produces evidence-backed C4 system, container and component representations.
• Extracts database tables, columns, relationships and indexes, while mapping outbound HTTP and gRPC service dependencies without exposing secret values.
• Implemented manifest-driven incremental processing using repository commit hashes, enabling only changed services to be analysed and combining successful outputs into a governed catalogue pull request.
• Applied bounded source inputs, schema validation, controlled concurrency, fail-closed workflows, workload identity and role separation so GitHub write credentials are isolated to publisher agents.
• Built with Python 3.13, Microsoft Foundry, Azure AI Projects, Azure Identity, the Responses protocol, GitHub APIs, GitHub Actions and Azure Developer CLI.