'22 — Now
4+ years
Full time
Chief Technology Officer
Hawker Brownlow Digital — Melbourne, AU
Owned the full technology stack of a lean, modern business — from cloud tenancy and mailboxes through to storefront, payments, CRM and finance. Vendor-agnostic operator who prefers boring, reliable tools connected thoughtfully.
- Ran Microsoft Azure tenancy, Entra ID and Office 365 — mailboxes, SSO, SSL certificates, backups and security posture.
- Managed hosting and domain portfolios across Azure, GoDaddy and Crazy Domains; DNS, cPanel and zero-downtime migrations.
- Designed and shipped the Squarespace and Shopify storefronts; integrated Square Payments sync with Xero for easy event reconciliation.
- Integrated the Xero API into our flagship learning platform so users could purchase subscriptions in-app — no storefront round-trip.
- Deployed Close CRM for sales, support and learning specialists; connected Shopify to Mailchimp for lifecycle marketing and EDM design.
- Built Zapier automations: landing-page leads into Google Sheets & Close, auto-assigned to reps, with Slack + email notifications on every new lead.
- Ran engineering in GitHub — protected branches, CI, PR review; connected to Azure for continuous deployment.
- Led ST4S security assessment to meet the national schools privacy & security framework across AU / NZ; commissioned external penetration testing with trusted partners.
- Secured government grant funding for a technology initiative; successfully led tender as an Advanced Supplier and online learning tool to the NSW Government for educational schools, teaching and learning.
- Used AI tools — ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney and Nano Banana — to accelerate draft development, ideation and asset exploration for K–12 learning materials, with curriculum alignment and human editorial oversight.
CTO
Azure · O365
Shopify · Square
Close · Mailchimp
Xero · Zapier