Dr. David "Jas" Powell
CTO · Head of Engineering — Interim, Contract & Permanent
About
Engineering leader with 25 years building and rebuilding engineering organisations — usually from a standing start, usually under hard constraint. Seven companies across regulated finance, maritime autonomy, automotive, mobile security and defence; two exits (Transitive to IBM, GuardianApp to DNSFilter). Recently architected and led delivery of an agentic-AI research platform now used weekly by 20,000 people, and designed a retrieval-augmented system that runs entirely offline on vessels at sea. Comfortable being the first engineering hire and the one who makes the buy-versus-build calls. Remote- and async-first by practice, not preference — recent teams spanned Colombia to Pakistan. Dual national, UK and EU (Cyprus): right to work across the EU and the UK without sponsorship. Contract engagements since 2016 delivered through Andle Engineering Ltd, an independent engineering-leadership consultancy. PhD in computational physics; publications under D. Powell.
Work Experience
SafeNav Ltd
July 2025 – June 2026
CTO & Co-Founder
Maritime autonomy spin-out from EU Horizon Europe project #101077026. Team of 7, remote across London, Athens and Larnaca. Contracted through Andle Engineering Ltd.
Highlights
- Ran the IP separation from the research consortium: acquired what could be acquired, and led a clean-room re-architecture and rebuild of everything that could not
- Designed and built Marin (Marine Intelligence) — a RAG system on vLLM and pgvector with a fine-tuned local model, deployed to beta, running on edge nodes aboard vessels with no connectivity
- Architected the production stack: ROS2 Jazzy, Eclipse Zenoh, FastAPI, PostgreSQL/TimescaleDB, cross-platform across Linux, macOS and Windows
- Built a simulation harness rather than buying sea trials — validated COLREGs collision-avoidance behaviour without consuming a materially large fraction of a €200K angel round
- Completed DNVGL-CG-0264 compliance assessment with a 17-item action plan; DNV Approval in Principle pending
Confidential FinTech Startup
October 2024 – July 2025
CTO
Agentic-AI trading research for retail Forex. Corporate-backed spin-off, team of 7. Fractional alongside SafeNav until January 2025, then full-time. Contracted through Andle Engineering Ltd.
Highlights
- Hired the entire engineering team from zero and set working practices, goals and review cadence
- Architected an agentic-AI system generating trading research for day traders, including the buy-versus-build boundary across the stack
- Chose to build as a monorepo across a polyglot system (Python/PostgreSQL backend, Node/React frontend) and owned the resulting CI/CD complexity
- Product launched and is used by 20,000 clients weekly; handed over a performing team on exit
SafeNav (EU Horizon Europe Project #101077026)
September 2022 – January 2025
Head of Engineering
COLREGs-compliant collision avoidance. €4.4M EU grant against €5.7M total project cost, 11-partner consortium, core team of 11. Engaged via OM Offshore Monitoring, Limassol, through Andle Engineering Ltd.
Highlights
- Grew the core engineering team from 6 to 11 — hired 5, inherited 6
- Owned architecture, planning and task management across an 11-organisation consortium of companies, SMEs and universities
- Delivered a TRL7 technology demonstrator taken to sea three times: two trials in Norway and Finland, one in the Mediterranean
- Ran the team across timezones from Colombia to India and Pakistan using async written updates on code pushes, a daily core-hours stand-up, and twice-yearly in-person consortium meetings
GuardianApp
January 2021 – August 2022
Senior Engineer
Smartphone cybersecurity; acquired by DNSFilter in August 2022. Individual contributor on a sister project to the main firewall and filtering product — low-level systems work by choice. Contracted through Andle Engineering Ltd.
Highlights
- Integrated QEMU with the Arcan display server, patching both to run Arcan as a client on an existing desktop GUI rather than owning the display stack outright
- Deep C-level work across virtualisation, display server internals and window system integration
- Minor shareholder at acquisition; departed at close rather than transfer into the acquirer
OVO
March 2019 – June 2020
CTO
Automotive IoT. Team of 8 plus a 5-person offshore development centre in Kyiv. Founded with the Munity CEO and COO to rebuild the working parts of the Munity technology for automotive. Contracted through Andle Engineering Ltd.
Highlights
- Delivered remote Android VMs rendered on in-dash vehicle head units at sub-180ms round-trip latency from vehicle to AWS Frankfurt over 4G — low enough for live turn-by-turn navigation in Larnaca and Tel Aviv
- Established the Kyiv ODC from scratch: sourcing, onboarding and running a 5-person mobile team
- Deployed to five test vehicles and demonstrated at motor shows including EcoMotion, Tel Aviv
- Two major European automotive manufacturers committed as investors; the round ended when COVID froze automotive investment in early 2020
Munity
May 2016 – March 2019
CTO
Smartphone cybersecurity, team of 14. Contracted through Andle Engineering Ltd.
Highlights
- Inherited 2 mobile developers and built the team to 14
- Reset the product thesis: concluded that no IT manager would buy 300 handsets and void the warranties by flashing a hardened ROM, and pivoted to a remote-desktop model instead
- Architected AOSP running on AWS Frankfurt, surfacing a full Android VM inside either an Android or iOS app — apps installed, files opened, and the VM concealable to leave only the base OS visible
- Reached large-scale beta with 3,000 users following an advertising campaign; company wound down when the lead investor withdrew
Albourne Partners
May 2012 – May 2016
Software Engineer
Institutional hedge fund research platform serving 400+ clients managing over $700B, plus a social platform of 100,000 users, under Cyprus SEC financial regulation. Team of 18.
Highlights
- Built a PDF reporting engine from scratch, generating custom white-labelled client reports from text and graphics extracted directly from the database
- Replaced a manual build-box process with automated CI and overnight randomised fuzz testing across the Java codebase, with automated email bug reports
- Owned Jenkins pipelines across Java, Python and Unix/Linux services; set testing and observability standards for a regulated environment
Intercollege Larnaca
January 2009 – May 2012
Head of Department, Computer Science
Academic and operational leadership: 8 staff, approximately 100 bachelor's-level students.
Highlights
- Brought in franchised degree packages from British universities for delivery by local faculty
- Ran hiring, performance review and development planning for the department
Transitive
July 2006 – December 2008
Senior Engineer
University of Manchester spin-out in dynamic binary translation, acquired by IBM. The technology shipped as Apple's Rosetta, enabling millions of MacBooks to run PowerPC applications on Intel silicon.
Highlights
- Core engineering on the optimisation team, working across compiler, runtime and OS layers in C/C++
- Moved by choice to lead a 4-person test/QA team — validating a dynamic binary translator, including bare-metal builds on IBM Power, is a genuinely hard verification problem
- Minor option holder at acquisition; stayed three months through IBM integration
MBDA
June 1999 – August 2001
Engineer
Defence systems engineering, Stevenage and Filton, UK. Seekers and sensors, under UK MoD standards. Part-time study to MEng alongside the role.
MBDA
June 1993 – September 1998
Apprentice Engineer
Full engineering apprenticeship, defence industry.
Education
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2002 2006
University of Sheffield
PhD
Electrical & Electronic Engineering (Nanostructure Physics)
Courses- Thesis: Elasticity, lattice dynamics and parameterisation techniques for the Tersoff potential applied to elemental and type III-V semiconductors
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1998 2002
University of Sheffield
MEng
Electrical & Electronic Engineering (Artificial Intelligence)
Courses- Thesis: Automatic design of digital circuitry using genetic algorithms
Skills
Engineering Leadership
Senior
Org design
Hiring
1:1 coaching
Performance and development planning
OKRs
Roadmap ownership
Technical strategy
Distributed and async teams
Buy-vs-build
Consortium and stakeholder management
Architecture
Senior
Event-driven systems
Distributed systems
Real-time and safety-critical
High-availability
API design
Network architecture
Cryptography and authentication protocols
AI/ML
Working
RAG architecture
vLLM
pgvector
Local model fine-tuning
Edge and offline inference
Agentic systems
LLM-augmented engineering workflows
Platform & DevSecOps
Senior
AWS
Linux
CI/CD
Jenkins
Observability
OS hardening
Fuzz and automated test strategy
Monorepo tooling
Systems & Virtualisation
Senior
Dynamic binary translation
QEMU
AOSP
Display server internals (Arcan)
Compiler, runtime and OS-layer engineering
Languages & Runtimes
Senior
Python
C/C++
Java
Go
Node/React
PostgreSQL/TimescaleDB
ROS2
Zenoh
Android/AOSP
Yocto
Publications
Comprehensive Approaches to Enhance Maritime Wireless Networks: A Survey
Under pressure: Control of strain, phonons and bandgap opening in rippled graphene
Optimized Tersoff potential parameters for tetrahedrally bonded III-V semiconductors
Physical Review B
07 March 2007
One of 12+ peer-reviewed papers published as D. Powell in Physical Review B, Carbon, Physica E, Journal of Physics and conference proceedings.