Head of Engineering · AI-Focused Technical Leader

Building teams that ship quality, faster.

I lead engineering organisations through AI-driven transformation — not just adopting new tools, but rebuilding how teams work, build and grow so they can deliver quality to customers and value to the organisation. Experience includes technical leadership positions at the BBC, Prettylittlething.com, Boohoo.com and many others.

Portrait of Paul Berry-Briggs

By the numbers

100×

Pricing engine throughput increase — hours down to under a minute

6 wks

10 years of legacy across 40+ PHP apps modernised for cloud/Kubernetes

£15k→£500k

Daily revenue scaled at Prettylittlething as first technical hire

4 days→2 hrs

Billing run time cut with a prototyped new billing service

Player-coach, servant leader, AI-native by default

AI-native teams

I don't bolt AI onto existing process — I rebuild the process around it. Agentic workflows and in-house tooling where it makes sense become the default way a team ships, not a side experiment.

Player-coach

I still write code, review architecture, and pick up the occasional proof of concept myself. Staying close to the work keeps my judgement sharp and earns the team's trust.

Servant leadership

My job is to clear blockers, not create them. I push autonomy down to team leads and measure my own success by how well the team delivers without me in the room.

Culture over process

Process changes stick when the culture wants them to. I focus first on trust, ownership and psychological safety — the agile ceremonies and tooling follow naturally after that.

Selected Projects

BBC Studios

Launching the BBC's first subscription product

Lead Architect, 2022–2026

A mission I strongly identified with. I took a small, highly agile squad from proof-of-concept to public launch — and left behind a culture of self-reliance and autonomy that's now the blueprint for how other teams at BBC Studios ship.

On time, zero major bugsFirst subscription launch in BBC history
Prettylittlething.com

First technical hire to £500k days

Head of IT / Development, 2013–2016

I was hired to hand-code everything — literally the entire stack — before building and leading the team that took over. Three years later the site was doing roughly £500k a day, up from £15k, and I was still hands-on with architecture and deployments.

£15k → £500k/dayRevenue scaled over 3 years as first tech hire
Crown Gas & Power

100× the pricing throughput

Head of Engineering

The pricing engine was the bottleneck for the whole business — runs took hours. I rebuilt it from the ground up so the same runs now finish in under a minute.

Hours → under a minute~100× pricing throughput increase
Boohoo.com

Foundations for a scaling business

Backend Developer (Contract), 2012

Part of a four-person team building the architecture for a company-wide ESB in Boohoo's earliest days — the integration backbone a lot of what came later was built on.

4-person teamCompany-wide ESB architecture, from day one
Freeway Insurance

From under-delivering to agile

Head of Technology, 2019–2020

Inherited a demotivated, underperforming software team. Rebuilt the process, the culture and the trust — and turned it into a team that shipped.

Demotivated → agileFull culture and delivery turnaround

Citizen Forge

A hub for the personal projects I build outside the day job — including irl, a presence-gated social network, and Custos, a full agentic SDLC engine. Prototypes I take all the way to production.

Visit citizen-forge.com →

Let's talk engineering, AI, or the next challenge.

Whether it's a role, a project, or just a conversation about agentic engineering — I'd like to hear from you.