Andrew Garner

Summary

I am a product‑minded technical leader with broad experience delivering resilient systems. I practise domain‑driven design and extreme programming. I am comfortable with ambiguity, owning challenging problems, and managing trade‑offs.

I embrace continuous learning, sharing knowledge, and mentoring others. I seek harmony and enable teams to perform at their best by fostering collaboration and removing obstacles.

Above all, I value curiosity, empathy, and simplicity.

Skills

Industry Knowledge

  • Distributed systems
  • Domain-driven design
  • Evolutionary architectures
  • Serverless architectures
  • Systems thinking
  • Test‑driven development

Tools & Technologies

Projects

Cazoo Marketplace

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I played a leading role in helping Cazoo transition to a pure‑play automotive marketplace business model. This included:

  • Contributing to a series of experiments to learn how consumers might sell their car to a dealer through a Cazoo auction platform.
  • Delivering incremental improvements across the funnel, focusing on key metrics such as valuation rate, offer rate, and acceptance rate.

Cazoo Operations

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I contributed significantly to the rapid scaling of operations at Cazoo, building processes and technology from the ground up across multiple domains. Key achievements include:

  • Created a solution to enable middle‑mile logistics planning and execution to be brought in‑house, ultimately scaling to support close to 160K used car sales.
  • Reduced the launch time for Cazoo Customer Centres from 3 weeks to 1 hour, enabling rapid scaling from 1 to 9 locations in less than 1 month. This expansion increased vehicle handover capacity, ultimately leading to an 8% increase in the overall conversion rate.
  • Lead technical discovery in collaboration with AI specialists from Satalia to enhance the scalability and efficiency of middle‑mile planning. This resulted in the formation of a new team that developed a custom optimisation model solving a novel vehicle routing problem.

HSBC Kinetic

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As a Solutions Architect, I delivered a transformational onboarding capability for HSBC’s new mobile‑first business banking service, Kinetic, built on Google Cloud. Kinetic enables small businesses to open an account in minutes via the app, compared to weeks with in‑person branch visits previously. My responsibilities included:

  • Working with and aligning multiple C‑level business stakeholders and collaborating with a globally distributed team.
  • Designing systems to capture anti‑money laundering (AML) and ‘know your customer’ (KYC) due diligence information.
  • Modelling onboarding processes using UML and BPMN.
  • Designing RESTful APIs using RAML.
  • Designing a microservice orchestration capability using Activiti’s open‑source BPM framework.
  • Integrating with HSBC core banking systems, ForgeRock OpenIDM and OpenAM identity and access management services, and Onfido for document identification and facial biometric verification services.

GOV.UK

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As a Senior Software Engineer, I contributed to several key projects for the Government Digital Service, including:

  • Migrated the core publishing platform to a new Content API.
  • Developed tools to support government publishers, enabling them to audit and measure the performance of published content.
  • Enhanced navigational patterns and validated a topic taxonomy, improving content discoverability.
  • Created a faceted search product specifically for Brexit‑related content.
  • Redesigned data.gov.uk, an open data platform.

Pension Wise

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As a Senior Software Engineer, I assisted HM Treasury in launching a new service offering guidance on pension options. My contributions included:

  • Playing a key role in the discovery, alpha, beta, and live phases of the service.
  • Building prototypes and testing assumptions in a user research lab.
  • Creating web applications with Ruby on Rails, Cucumber, and RSpec.
  • Setting up deployment pipelines, configuring monitoring systems, and operational dashboards.
  • Integrating with Twilio and Zendesk.

github.com/guidance-guarantee-programme

Money Advice Service

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I was the technical lead in a new team in a company‑wide agile transformation developing a responsive and accessible website. This included:

  • Adopting a hexagonal architecture in Ruby on Rails.
  • Creating a design system.

github.com/moneyadviceservice/frontend

White Label Dating

I worked on a number of projects to support the rapid growth of the White Label Dating platform. This included:

  • Mobile platform: A new web application and service layer consisting of a Ruby on Rails responsive frontend, Ruby REST APIs, and a Node.js router and authentication service. Continuous deployments to Rackspace Cloud infrastructure described and orchestrated with Puppet.
  • Event‑streaming platform: RabbitMQ and Ruby microservices supporting a number of use cases such as application push notifications, CDN purging and detecting dating scammers.
  • Transactional email platform: A new pipeline for rendering and sending personalised member emails using RabbitMQ and Ruby microservices. Peak volumes were in excess of 20M emails per day.

Experience

Cazoo

Staff Software Engineer, to
Senior Software Engineer, to
Software Engineer, to

Cazoo was founded in December 2018 with a mission to transform the car buying experience across the UK and Europe by offering better selection, quality, transparency, convenience, flexibility, and peace of mind.

Following its launch in December 2019, Cazoo reached a $1 billion valuation in October 2020, and went public on the New York Stock Exchange in August 2021 at a valuation of $8 billion. Cazoo developed a market-leading brand and an end‑to‑end supply chain, including vehicle reconditioning and both middle‑mile and last‑mile logistics. Despite their success, Cazoo entered administration in May 2024 due to financial challenges.

SureFire

Founder and Principal Consultant, to Present

SureFire helps make digital products and services. I have worked with clients including GDS, HM Treasury, HSBC, and the Money Advice Service.

Senior Software Engineer at Venntro

Senior Software Engineer, to

Venntro is a Deloitte Fast 50 technology business. I worked on their award‑winning service, White Label Dating, that provides online dating technology for brands and entrepreneurs.

iDEA

Software Engineer, to

iDEA are workplace design specialists. I created web apps for clients including the BBC, Gensler, HP, Johnson Controls, Microsoft, and Unilever.

Lighthouse

Software Engineer, to

Lighthouse are a small marketing and technology services agency. I worked on accounts for ASSA Abloy and Siemens Energy Services.

Qualifications