Software Engineering
Designing and architecting scalable systems, applying solid engineering principles and pragmatic best practice to ship software that lasts.
Staff Software Engineer · Platforms — London, UK
Hi, I'm Glen.
I build the platforms
teams build on.
I'm a Platform Engineer
15+ years turning tangled systems into resilient, scalable platforms — from cloud foundations and golden paths to the developer tooling that helps engineers ship with confidence.
About
Currently
Platforms @ M&S
I'm a staff-level engineer who lives where software, infrastructure and developer experience meet — building the platforms, golden paths and tooling that let product teams move fast without breaking things.
Over the last decade I've helped rebuild technology estates from the ground up, migrated legacy monoliths onto the cloud, designed federated GraphQL and event-driven systems, and championed the standards and CI/CD patterns that make engineering organisations hum. I care deeply about resilience, clarity and the human side of platforms — mentoring engineers and making the right thing the easy thing.
Today I lead platform engineering for front- and back-end products at Marks & Spencer, where great developer experience quietly powers a business millions of people rely on.
0
Years building
software
software
0
Engineering
roles
roles
What I do
Five things I'm relied on to get right — from the first architecture sketch to the platform thousands of deploys run through.
Technical Leadership
Leading cross-functional teams, mentoring engineers and setting the technical strategy that turns ambitious goals into delivered software.
System Architecture
Designing resilient, event-driven and distributed architectures that meet complex requirements and scale gracefully as the business grows.
Platform Building
Building internal developer platforms and tooling — golden paths, self-service and paved roads that let teams create, deploy and operate with ease.
Product Development
Partnering with stakeholders to translate business needs into innovative products that deliver measurable, real-world value.
Have something in mind?
Let's talk about platforms, architecture or the gnarly problem keeping you up at night.
Start a conversationExperience
Staff Software Engineer (Platforms)
Leading the design and implementation of internal developer platforms for front- and back-end products. Championing M&S's standard development frameworks, mentoring engineers and driving product planning with an agile approach.
Senior Platform Engineer
Designed, built and sustained the software platform underpinning diverse products and services. Partnered with product teams to tailor platform solutions, implemented robust monitoring and drove continuous-improvement initiatives.
Senior Engineer
Built APIs in Clojure and Python for internal teams and customer-facing applications. Managed AWS-based IoT device fleets and processed IoT data streams feeding machine-learning pipelines.
Senior Software / Platform Engineer
Led the reconstruction of the entire technology estate, moving from legacy systems to the cloud. Established CI/CD patterns, managed multi-account AWS infrastructure and designed federated GraphQL tooling.
Software Engineer
Developed high-throughput, low-latency e-commerce web services on Microsoft Azure and .NET. Implemented a distributed microservices architecture with REST APIs and Azure Service Bus using Kanban.
Senior Software Developer
Built a cutting-edge MiFID II-compliant equity-derivatives broking platform, transitioning from a .NET desktop framework to an AWS cloud-hosted web client on a distributed microservices architecture.
Senior Software Developer
Developed and maintained N-tier .NET applications with a service-oriented architecture using RabbitMQ messaging, delivering daily releases in rapid cycles while championing best practice.
Senior Software Developer
Worked on a C# WPF desktop application for document management used by various industries, implementing new features and improving performance while maintaining a high standard of code quality.
Education
University of Brighton
BSc Computer Science
Software engineering, algorithms, databases and networks — with an industrial placement in Credit Risk at Lloyds TSB covering risk modelling, regulatory-compliance systems and financial data analysis.
Long Road Sixth Form · Cambridge
A-levels
Computing, Maths, Physics and Electronics.
Skills & tooling
Platform & Cloud
- AWS
- Azure
- Akamai
- Cloudflare
- Terraform
- Infrastructure as Code
Languages
- TypeScript
- C#
- Python
- Kotlin
- Clojure
Platform Engineering
- CI/CD · GitHub Actions
- GitLab
- Serverless · Lambda
- Kubernetes
- Containers
- GitOps
- Internal Developer Platforms
Architecture
- Microservices
- Event-Driven Systems
- GraphQL
- REST APIs
Messaging & Data
- Kafka
- RabbitMQ
- Service Bus
- SQS / SNS
- PostgreSQL
- SQL Server
- DynamoDB
Writing
Notes on platform engineering, architecture and developer experience — published at blog.glen-thomas.com.
Fetching the latest posts…
06 — Contact
Let's build something
Let's build something
worth shipping.
Whether it's a platform to stand up, an architecture to untangle, or a team to level up — I'd love to hear about it.