John Blackmore

Head of Technology

Wonderful Payments Ltd • February 2022 - Present

• Report to the CEO and sit on the senior management team, with engineering responsibility across open banking, SME payments, charitable giving, and enterprise APIs, alongside team hiring and performance management
• Led the design and build of a Laravel open banking platform in approximately eight months, launching in November 2022 while maintaining the existing service. Contributed code reviews and technical documentation to the company’s FCA application
• Developed integrations with more than 40 UK banks, resolving inconsistent implementations and limited sandbox access. Extended the platform from Open Banking v3 to v4, supporting Payment Initiation Services (PIS) and Account Information Services (AIS)
• Led delivery of Wonderful One, an SME platform with product, customer, and order management plus WooCommerce and Xero integrations. Independently designed and built Asima, an enterprise AIS and PIS API, and maintained Wonderful Org’s donation and Gift Aid services
• Negotiated deferral of API and SDK components to meet a fixed product launch date; the product shipped on time. Manage applications across AWS and Google Cloud, including Forge-managed servers and Cloud Run container workloads
• Built an OpenCode agent that retrieves Sentry issue context, investigates local code, and generates a bug report and proposed fix using synthetic or sanitised data. Promoted AI-assisted pull request review before human review

Chief Technology Officer

Twindig Ltd • February 2020 - February 2022

• Joined the founder as the first paid employee, architected and built the Laravel platform, and hired three developers
• Owned technical system choices, roadmap priorities, and delivery planning in close partnership with the CEO, and supported investor technical due diligence through code reviews and documentation
• Built a platform compiling and reporting data on more than 27 million UK properties and over one billion data points, including sales, EPC certificates, crime, broadband, flood risk, and council data
• Established remote development practices, peer review, CI/CD, and automated deployments, supported by cloud architecture, Redis caching, queues, and event-driven design

Head of Engineering

Upad • January 2017 - October 2019

• Reported to the CTO and CEO, leading a remote development team and managing roadmap planning, delegation, delivery oversight, and performance reviews
• Worked with sales and customer success to shape the roadmap and develop tools around their needs
• Led Laravel modernisation, cloud hosting changes, code quality controls, and automated review and deployment pipelines
• Built an inbound telephony integration providing call routing and automatically displaying customer information for support staff, alongside payment-provider integrations and Onfido identity checks

Lead Developer

Upad • February 2016 - January 2017

• Grew the development team from two to six in the first year, hiring and onboarding developers and providing technical support and mentoring
• Introduced local development environments, migrated Subversion to GitHub, and created continuous integration and automated deployment workflows
• Modernised an inherited PHP application using Composer, autoloading, coding standards, and asynchronous queues

Technical Architect / Software Development Manager

Crowdcube • January 2013 - February 2016

• Joined as employee number six to manage two developers and two contractors. Planned a Laravel replatform within the first year and moved into architecture as development grew to around 20, with the wider technology team later reaching around 40
• Planned migration from a single virtual server to distributed, load-balanced Rackspace infrastructure and refactored the application for horizontal scaling. The platform handled more than 10,000 concurrent users
• Designed and developed card and direct debit integrations for crowdfunding pledges. Annual payment value reached approximately £100m around 2016
• Introduced Git, Jira backlogs, and two-week development sprints, and delivered internationalisation changes for partners in Sweden, Spain, and Poland

Freelance Consultant and Developer

Hello JB • April 2016 - Present

Part-time consulting and development for selected clients, including payment integrations with Stripe, PayPal, Braintree, and GoCardless, and identity verification and anti-fraud integrations

Earlier Roles

2007 - 2013

Managed teams of seven as PHP Technical Lead at Invitation Digital and Development Manager at Evosite. Led internationalisation across six European countries at Invitation Digital and contributed to a CMS platform used by more than 300 clients at Evosite. Earlier developer roles at BrightPearl, Webeurope, and Insured Risks Limited