Hello, my name is Joe Pettersson.
CTO
I lead technology and engineering at Banked, a scale-up venture backed technology company. The technology team has grown from 5 to 75, operating remotely. I lead engineering, security and solutions architecture whereI own technology end-to-end and am responsible for strategy and delivery.
(Senior) Advisor
I'm retained to provide advice to various venture capital and private equity firms. I perform technical due diligence for their target investments (>130 in ~15 years), as well as ongoing advisorship for post investment technical teams and general portfolio management.
Some highlights have been:
- Advising on the seed, A and B round investments for several household name 'unicorn' technology companies in the fintech and consumer space
- Serving as an observing board member and NED for nine portfolio companies
- Leading the efforts at a global top 10 VC firm's fund for investing in founders from underrepresented backgrounds
Partner and Founder
I am the founding partner at Havant Park, a pre-seed and seed focused venture capital fund that invests in the European startup eco-system. Our current fund has deployed $10 million into 40+ companies. The fund was created after I spent the the last 10 years as an angel investor.
VP Engineering
I led engineering at this fast growing, venture backed technology company. Taking the team from 5 to ~50 and scaling the platform and product to 130 billion requests per day; alongside 99.99% uptime.
I also built the support, customer success and product functions during my tenure; as well as being interim COO.
I helped Permutive raise $40 million across two rounds during my tenure. Whilst there I also sat on the IAB's Technical Advisory board and represented the ad-tech eco-system at the European Parliament.
VP Engineering and Client Delivery
I led global engineering and RnD, delivering scaled machine learning and AI to a diverse client portfolio. I was brought in as VP Engineering to succeed the co-founder and CTO, and take over global engineering and client technology delivery.
Further I was engaged to scale the Product Engineering team from ~40 to ~250 as well as enable an order of magnitude in productivity growth. Also, to build a world class RnD effort to further cement QuantumBlack as an industry leader in advancing machine learning.
I led an amazing team, but some particular highlights include:
- Creating Kedro, which has since gone on to have a huge impact on the way QuantumBlack and the wider community deploys models and data engineering pipelines into production
- Taking three products to market and generating ~$15 million in revenue
- Scaling the team beyond targets with world class engineers, and leading an organisation with the best engagement and happiness metrics across the wider McKinsey. Also, leading the way in building and inclusive and diverse team, with more than 40% women, non-binary or non-gender conforming team members.
Associate Partner
McKinsey & Company → April 2013 - May 2017
I joined Digital/McKinsey as the first full-time hire in EMEA and left as an Associate Partner, as well as holding the internal position as a Global Engineering Director and Head of Engineering (EMEA), I led the the team to ~350 world-class technologists.
While there I also co-led the Cloud Transformation practice in Western Europe; globally co-led the E-Retail and Online Travel Technology service line; globally led the Scaled Innovation practice; co-founded and co-lead the AI and Machine Learning practice in EMEA; and led the technology in PE practice.
I worked with many great clients, but some particular highlights include:
- Being seconded into a Group Head of Engineering role at a leading UK retail bank. Leading 10 labs and ~2,000 people as part of a £1.5 billion reinvention and transformation. With the team we reduced delivery times by >90%, and took six core products to market in 11 months. As well as serving 11 other banks at scale.
- Seconded as interim Chief Technology Officer at a global online travel player, building a new Engineering unit of 50 people and delivering 3 products to market in ~9 months, resulting in a ~15% revenue uplift and reducing the 'cost to market' by ~70%.
- Leading the analytics driven transformation at a global pharma company, taking 3 AI driven products to operationalisation and business impact in clinical operations and research and development. Helping to bring life changing and life saving drugs to market years sooner than previously possible.
- Supporting ~6 private equity firms through ~12 investments and acquisitions; advising them on product and technology, and helping implement their strategies post deal.
Co-founder / CTO
SureChem → December 2011 - April 2013
I co-founded a startup that made ML based HPC drug discovery products for the Pharma industry. We raised $11 million in two rounds and exited.
Our products allowed drug research organisations to input their pharmacological compounds, whereafter our models would mutate their properties (e.g. by flipping their chirality) and run billions of experiments against simulated cells and proteins. This could result in high-confidence recommendations for further research and development into new areas of efficaciousness.
We built an amazing team and product, but some highlights were:
- Building a team of 25 world class software engineers, data scientists and researchers in ~12 months.
- Delivering our innovative products to 3 of the 5 largest pharma companies.
- Winning 4 major industry awards for innovation; and publishing work in 3 high-impact research journals.
Engineering Director
Microsoft → June 2010 - Oct 2011
I was Engineering Director for two products in Microsoft's cloud business, which was branded Azure after my departure. I led the teams building the Core Platform services, the fabric on which all of the other services operated, and SQL-as-a-service.
I led the teams through a major period of growth, increasing their headcount by 200% (to 300+) as well as a major rebuilding of several critical components.
Some highlights were:
- Reducing the end-to-end cycle time of an already very mature Engineering organisation by ~20%.
- Achieving a group record 95% adherence to our SLOs, whilst delivering major products and features at a then record pace.
- Building the most gender diverse team in the group (~40% non-men) that consistently achieved top 10% scores in team satisfaction and engagement despite the pressure of the product environment.
Platform Lead/Snr. Engineering Manager
Skype → October 2009 - May 2010
I led the Platform Team at Skype in London, before and during it's acquisition by Microsoft. Combining data centre, operations, network ops, SRE and platform/developer tooling.
Some highlights included:
- Maintaining one of the highest talent retention rates in the organization through the complex acquisition process, as well as the highest team satisfaction ratings.
- Delivering infrastructure and services that supported more than 1 billion users, and at peak accounted for ~20% of the internets total traffic.
Principal SDE / Technical Product Manager
Mozilla → August 2007 - October 2009
I was Engineering Lead and Principal Engineer on two core Firefox teams and several other Foundation projects. I also spent time as a Product Manager, supporting Firefox's 100s of millions of global users.
Highlights included:
- Leading the team that developed the first native web developer tools as well as major upgrades to Firefox's JavaScript engine.
- Co-leading Mozilla's Diversity advocacy program in San Francisco.
Co-founder / CTO
Eight Bit → June 2003 - August 2007
I co-founded a consulting and professional services company, delivering predominantly web-based systems to more than forty clients in the online, retail, consumer, finance and defence sectors.
Our clients included Fidelity; JP Morgan; Bank of America; General Dynamics; Boeing; Nike; BMW; Disney; and others.
Associate
I joined Eversheds (now Eversheds Sutherland) before leaving as an Associate after completing my training contract and founding a technology consulting company.
📖 Publishing
I'm writing two books, the first on distributed systems and CRDTs in strongly typed programming environments and the second on scaling engineering teams and organisations. I've also published research in several high-impact academic journals on computational drug discovery, machine learning and NLP.
🔈 Public Speaking
I've spoken on building teams, the web, AI/machine learning and entrepreneurship at more than fifty conferences. I've also organised and chaired events with more than 14,000 attendees.
🤝 Non-profit work
I am a co-founder of Michael's House, another UK based non-profit dedicated to rehabilitating young men with a criminal record and particularly those with a history of gang violence. We've helped more than 400 young men change their lives in the last 10 years.
I am a co-founder of WeTeachDigital, a UK based non-profit dedicated to lobbying for and directly providing high-quality digital education and skills to young people. In that context I have also served as an advisor to the Council on Skills for the UK government, as part of a white paper being drafted on the future of primary and secondary education.
Beyond these projects I advise and support several non-profits, including the Gates Foundation and Médecins Sans Frontières. I advise or have had roles with various foundations dedicated to open source software, including the ASF, CNCF and the Linux Foundation. Finally, I have contributed to numerous standards bodies, including TC39, W3C and the IAB.
👾 Open Source
I'm very proud of the contributions I make directly to the open source community, this includes projects like: TensorFlow; Redis; the Linux kernel; ReactJS and several dozen others.