Sean White
Senior Full Stack Software Engineer · Reading, United Kingdom
13+ years building scalable, business-critical systems across SaaS, ERP, observability and data platforms.
13+
years in production since 2012
Clarity Global 2025 to now, Oh Dear 2021 to 2025, Redwood Software 2023 to 2024, Guide Dogs for the Blind Association 2012 to 2021
What I'm doing now
I'm a Senior Full Stack Software Developer at Clarity Global, the first internal hire, working directly with the CTO to build Surfacd and help the wider team adopt AI-assisted workflows.
- 3.5m+
- requests a day through infrastructure I designed
- Oh Dear
- -66%
- infrastructure costs after a migration I led
- Oh Dear
- 20,000+
- tests on the platform I work on now
- Clarity Global
Always close to the data
Data and reporting have run through every role, even the software ones: finance reporting, metrics dashboards, monitoring data and now ingestion pipelines.
Best where others won't go
I do my best work in the situations people would rather avoid: untested legacy code, production issues and debugging with restricted access.
Fluent in finance
I can read a P&L as comfortably as a stack trace. That means I can sit with the finance team, then go and build what they actually meant.
- 2012 - 2021Guide DogsFinance reporting, SQL, Power BI
- 2023 - 2024RedwoodMetrics framework and dashboards
- 2021 - 2025Oh DearMonitoring data and alerting
- 2025 - nowSurfacdData ingestion pipelines and AEO reporting
- PHP
- Laravel
- TypeScript
- React
- Node
- Postgres
- MySQL
- AWS
- Cloudflare
- Docker
GEO Analytics
Took a proof of concept to a production-ready platform, balancing speed and quality.
- 01
Concept
Sep 2025
- First internal hire, working directly with the CTO
- A proof of concept for a GEO data platform
- 02
Production
Built to scale
- Resilient pipelines with proxy rotation, retries and fallbacks
- Monitoring and alerting across data collection
- Benchmarked LLM usage across the pipeline
- 03
Paying customers
Launched Feb 2026
- Public launch at surfacd.com
- Data ingestion pipelines and AEO reporting
- tests20,000+ passing
- coverage100%
- static analysisstrict
AI enablement
How to quickly partner with a CTO and work closely to launch a new product while setting early standards for code quality, decision-making and future growth.
Helping technical and non-technical teams adopt AI-assisted workflows safely and effectively.
Uptime monitoring
A high-scale observability platform processing billions of uptime checks and millions of notifications. I designed and led the migration of its heartbeat infrastructure.
- 24ms
- average latency
- 0
- requests since you opened this page
Spiked on a train, live by the end of the conference
I sketched the proof of concept on the morning train from London to a conference in Amsterdam, and had it deployed by the last day. It now handles 3.5m+ heartbeat requests a day.
Response latency
-83%
Same request, same distance. Slowed down so you can see it.
Infrastructure costs
-66%
The new stack costs about a third of the old one, while simplifying it for speed and maintainability.
- Asset-level uptime monitoring across scripts, stylesheets, images and dependencies
- Mock crawler infrastructure for reliable automated testing in CI
- Multilingual status pages, built with TDD
- Debugging and operational CLI tooling to cut issue resolution time
SAP Enterprise
Enterprise automation SaaS on multi-tenant AWS. I introduced automated testing and modern engineering standards.
$ vendor/bin/phpunit
PHPUnit
No tests executed!
# 12 months later
$ vendor/bin/phpunit
900 / 900
OK (900+ tests)
- PHPUnit
- Cypress
- PHPStan
- Rector
- CS Fixer
- Veracode
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- Bitbucket CI/CD
- Refactored legacy systems to PHP 8.1 using TDD
- Led code reviews, technical planning and process improvements
Metrics and reporting framework
Designed reporting and analytics tooling for customer success, support and infrastructure teams: metrics frameworks, dashboards and subscription-based reports across multiple data sources.
Data sources
- Jira
- Zendesk
- Prometheus
- Internal platforms
Subscribed Weekly report emailed to the customer success team
Finance automation(before it was cool)
Nine years leading finance systems and reporting at a large national charity, sitting between IT and finance.
Automating finance, before AI was a thing
Process automation across finance and operations, built with VBA, SQL and low-code tools.
01 / 05 Paper to system
Scanning paper documents straight into the ERP, with no retyping.
I did not always have access to IT infrastructure, tools or privileges, so debugging with restricted access meant mixing local code (VBA), low-code tools (MS Power Platform), smarter logging and changes to business processes.
When I'm not working
Off the clock, I'm usually making noise or hanging off a wall.
Drums, guitar, golf and bouldering keep me away from the keyboard. They reward the same things good engineering does: practice, patience and being happy to try again.
Drums
Playing by ear, because I never read the docs
1e|----------------------------| 2B|----------------------------| 3G|----------------------------| 4D|--2---5---7---5---2---8---7-| 5A|--2---5---7---5---2---8---7-| 6E|--0---3---5---3---0---6---5-|
Guitar
Distortion is a feature, not a bug
Golf
The only scorecard I don't want to automate
Bouldering
Grip strength for typing