Jacob Clark

Technology Leader with over a decade of experience working with brands such as LexisNexis, McKinsey & Company, Gousto, The Very Group, UK Government, BBC, The Co-op and Booking.com.

A strategic, pragmatic and people focused leader with deeply rooted hands on software & data engineering background. I champion user centric, lean cultures of delivery that prioritise people, transparency and bias for action.

My roots are in polyglot software engineering, across all sizes of web/cloud/data stacks. Java to JavaScript, Databricks to Snowflake, Lambda to Kubernetes. I’ve practised, coached and instilled all manner of true agile and XP practices, from pair/ensemble programming, TDD, CI & CD, data & metric informed iteration as well as discovery/alpha/beta product life cycles. I champion balancing risk against outcomes whilst fostering lean development practices with just enough governance. I have led DORA, SPACE, DataOps and CoE implementations to drive up delivery maturity across several organisations. Experienced in both high scale/high throughput environments as well as large enterprise technology systems.

I’ve managed $MM budgets, led leaders across several organisational levels, grown and built diverse teams creating world-class engineering capabilities, achieved daily releases in double digits, grown and sustained user bases in the millions, and efficiently handled data volumes in the petabytes. I have also led organisations through difficult periods of organisational right-sizing.

Here are some of my key achievements so far:

- I course-corrected LexisNexis IPs Technology organisation, reducing overall expenditure by $3m whilst simultaneously driving up revenue, NPS, eNPS, Deployment Frequencies and driving down Change Failure Rates. Led a pivotal change in strategic technology direction, enabling two new core revenue drivers, Data as a Product and GenAI Product Workflows.

- I headed AND Digital’s Manchester Engineering Practice, establishing a revenue trajectory from £300k to over £1m, hiring over 60 Engineers, aligning capability with local market demand and working closely with sales to land key clients.

- I led the BBC’s move to a sustainable App product architecture, relieving over £1m in cost whilst driving up deployment frequency and reliability increasing App Store ratings from a 3-star average to 4-star.