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Alan Bryden

NowEngineering Team Lead at ProxymityGlasgow, UK

I build critical systems, lead engineering teams and improve how software gets delivered.

Ten years of hands-on engineering, mostly in financial services, from JPMorgan to leading a team of five at Proxymity. I work across architecture, delivery and production on business-critical platforms built with Java, Kafka and AWS, and I've helped make AI-assisted development something a team can rely on.

Explore my workView experienceContact
Illustrative system topologyAn abstract illustration of the kinds of systems I work on, not a specific system. Work is ingested through a gateway into a partitioned event stream, consumed by idempotent workers, projected into read models and kept in a data store, with observability throughout. Below it, a conceptual delivery loop runs from spec, to AI agents, to review, to shipping.Ingestapis · filesGatewayvalidate · routeEvent streampartitionedConsumersscale outRead modelsprojectionsData storedurable stateObservabilitytraces · metricsSpecAgentsReviewShip
Illustrative system topologyAn abstract illustration of the kinds of systems I work on, not a specific system. Ingest and a gateway feed a partitioned event stream, which fans out to consumers, read models and a data store, with observability across every hop. Below it, a separate delivery lane runs from spec, to AI agents, to review, to shipping.Observabilitytraces · metricsIngestapis · filesGatewayvalidateEvent streampartitionedConsumersscale outRead modelsprojectionsData storedurableSpecAgentsReviewShip

Fig. 00 illustrative, not a real system

At a glance

  1. 01Experience10 yearsEngineering, mostly financial servicesBackend and distributed systems at JPMorgan, FSB Technology and Proxymity.
  2. 02LeadershipTeam of fiveHands-on team leadershipTechnical direction, coaching and delivery ownership, still close to the code.
  3. 03AI-nativeAI-assisted deliveryPractice, not just toolingSpec-driven development, automated review and testing a team can rely on.
  4. 04ProductsThree appsDesigned, built and shippedNative software for Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, owned end to end.ControlPadTVControlRepSense
01Experience

From software engineer to technical owner to engineering leader.

Each role wider than the last: from individual services, to the platforms they form, to the team and the delivery that keep them moving. Scope tags mark how far each piece of work reached.

2016 – Present

JPMorganFSB TechnologyProxymity

Scope by role, widening over time: Software Engineer / Associate Software Engineer at JPMorgan (Microservices, Cloud, Pipelines); then Senior Backend Engineer at FSB Technology (Integrations, Clients, Onboarding); then Senior Software Engineer at Proxymity (Services, Platform, Security); then Engineering Team Lead at Proxymity (Team, Delivery, Practices, Performance).Engineer · JPMorganSenior Backend · FSB TechnologySenior Engineer · ProxymityTeam Lead · ProxymityTeamDeliveryPracticesPerformance
  1. Engineer · JPMorgan2016–2021
  2. Senior Backend · FSB Technology2021–2022
  3. Senior Engineer · Proxymity2022–2025
  4. Team Lead · Proxymity2025–now

    ScopeTeam · Delivery · Practices · Performance

Fig. 01 scope by role, widening over time

  1. Proxymity

    Investor-communications platform for real-time proxy voting and shareholder identification.UK remote

    1. 01.1Aug 2025 – PresentPromoted

      Engineering Team Lead

      Leading a team of five software engineers. I set technical direction, coach, and own delivery, while staying hands-on in design and code and helping the team make architectural and product decisions independently.

      • Org-wide scope:Helped shape and implement AI-assisted engineering practices with senior technical leadership, introducing reusable workflows for specification-driven development, automated review and testing.
      • Cross-team scope:Selected to lead a cross-team platform performance initiative, improving scalability and resilience across multiple services.
      • Cross-team scope:Introduced agent-assisted workflows for code review, test planning and end-to-end testing that were adopted beyond my own team.
      • Cross-team scope:Resolved critical production issues and delivery blockers across service boundaries, turning ambiguous requirements into tested solutions under tight deadlines.
      • Team scope:Led technical delivery of a business-critical regulatory capability, coordinating engineering, QA, product and external stakeholders.

    2. 01.2Dec 2022 – Aug 2025

      Senior Software Engineer

      Backend engineering on Java, Spring Boot, Kafka, PostgreSQL and AWS, growing into the technical owner of a new platform.

      • Designed and delivered independently deployable services, improving maintainability, scalability and team autonomy.
      • Architected and delivered the majority of a greenfield platform, becoming its key technical subject-matter expert as the platform and its operational requirements evolved.
      • Led security-focused engineering to protect sensitive financial data without losing essential operational functionality.

  2. FSB Technology

    Omnichannel iGaming platform provider.UK remote

    1. 01.32021 – 2022

      Senior Backend Engineer

      Client-facing backend engineering on a global platform, from solution design through implementation and demonstration. Delivered sportsbook, casino, payment and bespoke client integrations for a global omnichannel platform. Worked directly with the project owner and clients from solution design to demonstration, onboarding engineers and reinforcing robust engineering practices.

  3. JPMorgan

    Global financial services.Glasgow

    1. 01.42016 – 2021

      Software Engineer / Associate Software Engineer

      Five years building and modernising business-critical applications in a global bank. Helped redesign business-critical applications around microservices and cloud technologies to improve performance, stability and scalability. Delivered tested services through automated deployment pipelines, contributed to architectural decisions, mentored colleagues and represented engineering in business planning.

Education

Software Development for Business, First Class HonoursGlasgow Caledonian University

02Approach

How I lead engineering.

I lead from close to the code: enough time in design reviews and pull requests to keep my judgement current, and enough distance to keep the team, not me, at the centre of the work. The job is to make good engineering the default.

  1. 02.1

    Technical direction

    Decide in the open. I make architectural calls with the trade-offs written down, prefer reversible decisions where speed matters, and weigh this quarter's delivery against the system the team will still be maintaining in three years.

    In my work

    Technical owner of a greenfield platform I largely architected; now setting direction for my team's services.

  2. 02.2

    Developing engineers

    The goal is engineers who don't need me in the room. Context over instructions, real ownership of designs, and feedback grounded in the work, so judgement grows alongside responsibility.

    In my work

    Leading five engineers and supporting them to make architectural and product decisions independently; mentoring and onboarding engineers since JPMorgan.

  3. 02.3

    Delivery, risk and stakeholders

    Own the outcome, not the ticket. Keep priorities explicit, protect the team's capacity from churn, raise risk early with options attached, and translate between engineering, product and external stakeholders.

    In my work

    Put to work on a business-critical regulatory delivery spanning engineering, QA, product and external stakeholders.

  4. 02.4

    Production and incidents

    When production or a client commitment is at stake, get close to the problem: establish the facts, contain the impact, fix safely, and make sure the cause is understood rather than just the symptom.

    In my work

    Critical production issues and delivery blockers that cross service boundaries, resolved under tight deadlines.

03AI-native engineering

AI should amplify engineering judgement, not replace it.

I've helped shape and implement AI-assisted engineering practices in a regulated fintech environment: specification-driven development, reusable agent workflows, automated review and testing. What follows is the thinking behind that work.
An AI-native engineering loopA conceptual AI-native engineering workflow. Requirements become a human-owned specification. Agents take the spec and produce an implementation and a test plan. The implementation goes to review, assisted and then approved by a human; the test plan runs as end-to-end tests that produce evidence. Review and evidence together lead to delivery. Review can send changes back to the agents, and gaps in the evidence send work back to the spec.Requirementswhat, and whyHUMANSpecificationtestable intentAgentsplan, build, testImplementationscoped changesTest planfrom the specHUMANReviewhuman-approvedEvidenceend-to-end runsDeliverywith a trail
Fig. 03 conceptual engineering workflow select a stagehuman = accountable owner · dashed = feedback

02 / 08 human-owned

Specification

What happens
Requirements become a structured specification: scope, non-goals, acceptance criteria and the evidence the change must produce.
Human role
An engineer owns the specification and the trade-offs in it.
Quality gate
Acceptance criteria are testable before any code is written.
Where AI falls short
Agents help find gaps and ambiguity, and ambiguity here is the most common cause of poor agent output.

Throughput is the easy part. The hard part is designing a way of working where agents do more of the doing while engineers keep ownership of intent, architecture and correctness, so a team ships faster without trading away reliability, security or maintainability.

Speed without the usual trade-offs

Reliability
Acceptance criteria become tests, and a change arrives with evidence a reviewer can check, not just a diff.
Security
Security is part of the definition of done: written into shared standards, checked in review, with human judgement on anything sensitive.
Maintainability
Changes stay small and follow the team's conventions, and the spec remains as the record of why the code exists.
04Selected work

Problems worth owning.

Engineering notes on the problems I keep meeting at work: the constraints, the patterns I reach for and the trade-offs they carry. Employer systems stay confidential, so the notes are generalised; the case study is software I shipped myself.

Engineering notesGeneralised from employer work

  1. 04.1

    Distributed systems

    Building Reliable Event-Driven Financial Systems

    Decouple acceptance from processing, make every consumer idempotent, and trace each item end to end.

  2. 04.2

    Performance engineering

    Scaling Platform Services and Improving Resilience

    Observe, measure, find the contention, optimise, isolate workloads, validate, and model capacity.

  3. 04.3

    AI-native engineering

    Building AI-Native Engineering Workflows

    A lifecycle where agents build against a spec using shared skills, verify their work, and leave evidence for a human reviewer.

Case studyDelivered work, described as built

  1. 04.4

    Product engineering

    Shipping Independent Apple-Platform Products

    Keep the architecture local and simple, design around platform constraints, and own the release path.

05Products

Software I design, build and ship myself.

Three launched products for the Apple ecosystem, each taken from idea to users and still maintained: product decisions, interaction design, engineering, release, distribution and support.
05.1Launched
  • macOS
  • iOS
  • iPadOS

ControlPad

A trackpad, keyboard and remote for your Mac, with controls that follow the app you're using.

Problem
Controlling a Mac from the sofa, the other side of the desk or a presentation means a trackpad and keyboard you don't have with you, and generic remotes don't know which app you're using.
My role
Designed, built and launched solo across three platforms: product strategy, architecture, interaction design, the networking and security model, signing and notarisation, distribution, website and support.
App Store(opens in a new tab)controlpad.tech(opens in a new tab)Product notes
A MacBook Pro showing Safari, the app ControlPad is controlling
ControlPad on iPad in the Balanced layout: a trackpad beside Safari's commands
ControlPad on iPhone with the trackpad above the keyboard and Mac modifier keys
Fig. 05.1 ControlPad on Mac, iPad and iPhone
06About
Alan Bryden, Glasgow, UK
Fig. 06 Alan Bryden, Glasgow, UK

I'm an engineering leader who still enjoys the hard part: understanding a system deeply enough to change it safely.

Most of my career has been spent on problems that only show up in production: data that outgrows the original design, workflows that must stay correct under retries, and deadlines where someone is waiting on the fix. That's shaped how I lead: close to the detail, calm under pressure, and biased towards evidence over opinion.

What I enjoy most now is the multiplier: helping engineers grow into owners, and improving the way a team works so that good outcomes stop depending on any one person, including me.

Outside work I design and ship my own software for the Apple ecosystem. It keeps me honest about the details users notice, and about the discipline of actually finishing things.

Base
Glasgow, Scotland
Role
Engineering Team Lead · Proxymity
Previously
FSB Technology, JPMorgan
Stack
Java, Spring Boot, Kafka, PostgreSQL, AWS · Swift, SwiftUI
Education
First Class Honours, Software Development for Business, Glasgow Caledonian University
Products
ControlPad, TVControl, RepSense
07Contact

Building something that needs to scale? Let's talk.

I'm glad to talk about engineering leadership, distributed systems in financial technology, and making AI-native delivery work for a real team.