A site manager at a locked gate with forty workers behind him does not care which component failed. He needs to know who has completed the induction, who holds the right permit and whether the day can start. I judge our engineering by that moment first, and by the elegance of our architecture a long way second.
Selected leadership work / 01
Pausing feature work for eleven weeks to separate customer data inside the database
In March 2023 an engineer reviewing a new subcontractor-compliance export noticed that one report query filtered records by project but not by customer account.
A construction customer measures software reliability in the hour before the first concrete truck arrives, so that hour should decide where my engineering money goes.
I am chief technology officer of Quorrindale Site Systems, a privately owned Melbourne company whose software runs gate sign-in, worker inductions, safety paperwork, site diaries and defect records for about 620 builders and civil contractors. On a typical weekday roughly 1,850 sites use it and about 58,000 workers sign in, most of them between six and quarter past seven. Revenue for the year to 30 June 2026 was A$47.2 million. I lead 58 engineers, platform, security and data staff, and a technology budget of A$13.6 million that includes A$3.9 million of cloud spending.
My first job, in February 1999, was writing plant-hire and timesheet systems for a civil contractor in Newcastle. I spent enough mornings in site sheds to learn that a foreman will abandon any screen that slows the start of work. Later I wrote permit software for local councils and then spent five years on a hosting company's on-call rota in Sydney, where outages taught me to write down what had happened before anyone discussed blame. I joined Quorrindale in 2014, when it had nine engineers.
The decisions I find worth discussing all involved giving something up. We paused most feature work for eleven weeks to separate each customer's data properly inside the database. We moved older site photographs to slower, cheaper storage and lost a customer over it. We paid more than twice as much to keep our standby systems in Melbourne rather than Singapore because our contracts promise Australian hosting. None of those choices was free, and I describe their costs as plainly as their results.
Separation of customer data enforced by the database
After a review caught a report that could have returned another builder's subcontractor list, we rewrote 318 of 2,140 queries so that every request carries its account. An external test in November 2023 found no path between customers. A large customer delayed a A$410,000 expansion while we did it.
Cloud spending brought back to 8.3 per cent of revenue
Cloud costs were 11.6 per cent of revenue in the 2024 financial year, driven by about 1.1 petabytes of site photographs. Archiving untouched images and resizing our compute brought the share to 8.3 per cent in 2026, at the price of slower retrieval for older projects.
A morning standby that never leaves Australia
Since March 2025, sign-in, inductions, permits and diaries can switch from Sydney to Melbourne. Our third failover rehearsal took nine minutes against a fifteen-minute objective. Weekday availability between 6.00 and 8.00 am was 99.96 per cent across the 2026 financial year.
Current focus
I am rebuilding the permits module, which we deferred for two quarters to fund the standby work, and teaching our seven product teams to estimate the cloud cost of a feature before they build it rather than after the invoice arrives.
Conversations I welcome
I am seeking a first non-executive role on a board or its audit and risk committee, in software, construction services or a member organisation, with about twenty-two days a year available subject to my chief executive's consent and a conflicts review.
The leadership record
Trusted with consequential decisions.
Formation
Bachelor of Engineering (Software)Calderwyn Institute of Technology · 1998
Edward brings the committee the rehearsal results that missed their objective as well as the ones that met it. When he wanted the dearer standby, he set out the cheaper option fairly and showed us which contracts it would have broken.
Ruth EllenboroughNon-executive director and chair of the audit and risk committee, Quorrindale Site SystemsThe full record ↗
Contact
I am seeking a first non-executive role on a board or its audit and risk committee, in software, construction services or a member organisation, with about twenty-two days a year available subject to my chief executive's consent and a conflicts review.
