Consultancy, Audits & Klevu

Independent work from April 2018: platform and code audits, solutions architecture and developer relations. This is the work clients brought me in for when they needed somebody who could read the system and tell them the truth about it.

Platform and Code Audits (2018 to 2020)

Productised, fixed-fee, enterprise-grade audits for e-commerce merchants. 10 to 15 engagements, delivered autonomously and presented in person to client leadership. Clients included ME+EM, Kinetico, Big Green Egg and Madison Bikes (FreeWheel).

What a client got: a scored executive summary and prioritised recommendations with effort estimates, backed by full evidence:

Solution architecture, indexer, cache and cron review
ERP and search integrations
Hosting and deployment (Magento Commerce Cloud, Platform.sh) and Git flow
Database review
Per-extension code review, graded A to F
Functional review against the original spec, and error analysis
Front-end and application performance (GTmetrix, WebPageTest, Lighthouse, New Relic, Blackfire)
Redis and Varnish architecture, and server tuning
Security: OWASP Top 10, malware scans and a core diff
Upgrade gap analysis and vendor-transition runbooks

Where the value was. Judgment over tool output. I called the false positives, found root causes and made the architectural calls. See Case Studies for examples.

Klevu · Senior Solutions Architect · Developer Relations (2018 to 2020)

Enterprise AI-powered search SaaS, now Athos Commerce. It enriched catalogues with NLP and served them by API for natural-language and image search across Magento, BigCommerce and Shopify.

What I did:

Developer relations, onboarding and documentation for the integrations: installation guides, API testing and usage docs
Fed developer friction back into the product
Hosted developer webinars, including a PWA session for around 50 merchants
Worked the forums and advocated for the product
Wrote long-form technical and marketing content on NLP, AI-generated search content and indexing

Where my background mattered: I had trialled Klevu as search at Folk before it became a client. I knew what a merchant's stack looks like from the inside.

Architecture Engagements

The Sofa & Chair Company (Aug 2020 to Sep 2021)

Solutions architect and interim technical lead, fully remote. Magento 2 re-platform of a MADE.COM-scale operation. Vendor selection covered AI search and PIM. See Case Studies.

Pernod Ricard, Canary Wharf Group and Big Green Egg (Dec 2016 to 2017)

Ex-Folk clients I transitioned when the agency closed. Pernod Ricard: content-first Magento build and AWS architecture. Canary Wharf: international sites for property developments on a bespoke PHP build. Big Green Egg: platform audit and Brightpearl ERP scoping.

Technical Ground

Architecture and platforms:

Solution architecture for enterprise commerce and integrations
ERP integration: Microsoft Dynamics NAV, NetSuite, Sage, SAP
Headless commerce (Vue, React, GraphQL), Magento 1 and 2, Shopify, BigCommerce
PIM (Akeneo) and search (Klevu, Elasticsearch, Solr)

Infrastructure and security:

AWS (EC2, S3, ELB, Auto Scaling, RDS), self-managed LAMP and Nginx
Redis, Memcached, Varnish, Cloudflare CDN and WAF
New Relic, Blackfire, Lighthouse, Jenkins, Docker, CI/CD
OWASP Top 10, hardening and incident response, pen-test vendor management

Languages (working level): PHP, JavaScript and TypeScript, SQL (MySQL, Postgres). Magento depth runs to 2020. I read and review code; I ship with agentic tooling.

Reading level: Cairo. Enough to review and document.

→ Leadership & Delivery for the CTO history → Tools & Platforms for the working stack → Contact to discuss a role

Case Studies Tools & Platforms