Nick Whitehead

I’m the Lead Software Architect at Bifold Ltd, a manufacturing company that designs and manufactures high quality and highly specified valves and manifold assemblies for the oil and gas industry. In this role I lead a small team of application developers to concentrate on three key areas of the business: product configurators, online product visualisation and internal infrastructure and software.

Our most exciting and impressive work to date has been the introduction of Bifold’s configurator infrastructure that enables staff and customers to create, view and download complex bespoke datasheets, drawings and 3D models on the fly and in real time on iOS, Android and PC. It’s extremely rewarding to see customers and colleagues reactions and occasionally ovation to live demonstrations.

I built the Application Development team and function at Bifold from the ground up. Before my current position I was a Design Engineer in the same company and the knowledge gained from this has aided greatly in understanding how a manufacturing company operates and how my team can positively affect its efficiency.

While I enjoy all aspects of my job, I particularly like working with other teams to brainstorm ideas and get feedback on ideas for the systems we implement. I also like the challenge of designing a system that will do considerably more than any previous process whilst having the compulsory benefit of being quicker and easier to use.

I have an MEng(Hons) in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Manchester.