Description

Hello, I am an engineering leader with a business background who has always seen technology as an enabler — I take full ownership of delivery and am as comfortable discussing the why and the how. Experienced in building and managing backend, data and cloud engineering teams, staying close to the craft through code reviews, architectural decisions and hands-on problem solving. I work effectively with engineers, architects and business stakeholders at all levels. I'm actively building with AI-assisted development workflows, with several deployed applications to show for it.

Take a look at nickwhiteley.com for details of current projects.

Languages

English
Native or bilingual

Workplace preferences

Can work on-site

London (up to 50km), Basingstoke (up to 10km), Andover (up to 10km)

Chetwood Bank
Optimisation Manager
BANKING AND INSURANCE
November 2025 - March 2026 (4 months)
London, United Kingdom
• ● Undertook a review of the bank's mortgage software estate with operational and systems analysis to produce a board recommendation paper.
• ● Design of new architecture for mortgage origination across both of the bank's brands, leading to vendor selection (RFP).
• ● Coaching software engineers in product teams for improved delivery.
software architect
Chetwood Bank
Engineering Manager – Unsecured lending and savings
BANKING AND INSURANCE
April 2024 - October 2025 (1 year and 6 months)
London, United Kingdom
• ● Set up and led an engineering team to develop and optimise the loans and savings banking software estate, written in Python running on AWS.
• ● Identified key drivers of system failure, cost over-run and vulnerabilities.
• ● Implemented better monitoring, alerting, improved application responsiveness and reduced costs by about $500k p/a.
• ● Led projects to migrate loan processing to a new platform and to rectify historic interest calculation issues and remediate customers, to the regulator's complete satisfaction.
• ● Ran fortnightly planning and review sessions and quarterly in-person planning meetups.
• ● Built and implemented product improvements and enhanced data security.
• ● Risk management across loans, credit cards and savings software products.
• ● Managed a team of Python, cloud and data engineers as well as testers.
• ● Set out roadmaps, conducting code reviews, performance reviews and developing skills.
• ● Software engineer coaching, both junior and senior levels.
• ● Undertook code reviews, solutions architecture design, technical forum presentations.
• ● Evaluated staff activities on team and individual level, providing feedback to guide improvement.
Technology leadership, software architect AWS Atlassian JIRA
Chetwood Bank
Engineering Manager – Data
BANKING AND INSURANCE
April 2022 - April 2024 (2 years)
London, United Kingdom
• ● Headed up a data department with Data Engineering (6 people), BI Engineering (3 people) and Database Dev (3 people) teams plus contractors and consultants, on and offshore.
• ● Delivered, from initiation to production, a data warehouse and data lake to enable better decision making, risk management, regulatory reporting and marketing capabilities. Data governance was a key element of design. CI/CD was a key element of implementation.
• ● Defined a strategy for data including step change in quality and governance.
• ● Responsible for design and development of banking back-end data systems.
• ● Provided stability and support for engineers through a merger and several organisational shake-ups.
• ● Publicity on how better data handling benefits the whole organisation.
SQL Amazon Redshift PostgreSQL Data Governance