A. L. R. Halford

Chief technology officer,
principal architect,
occasional novelist.

I help companies turn ambitious briefs into systems they can audit, ship, and live with — complex, high-integrity platforms built to scale. Two decades of it, much in fintech, architecting for Tier 1 banks, insurers, and pension providers; but the same engineering judgment carries to any domain where correctness and scale matter. Background in Physics at Imperial.

1. 2025 — now

   Senior Technical Consultant · GBST Wealth Management

   Directing the technical transformation of legacy pension management platforms in use at Aegon, Halifax, and Scottish Widows. Translating enterprise client requirements into architectural blueprints — and into systems that get built.

   Java · Spring Boot · React · EmberJS
2. 2024 — now

   Director (Board) · New Crane Wharf Freehold Limited

   On the board of the company that owns the freehold of a 24-hour portered, high-security residential building, where directors collectively set and allocate a c. £1M annual operating budget. I lead technology strategy across the building — CCTV, access control, intercom, and network infrastructure.

3. 2023 — 2024

   Client Solutions Architect · 10X Banking

   Architected the integration layer between 10X's core banking software and multinational client systems (J.P. Morgan and others), running pre-sales proofs of concept through to production deployment.

   Go · PostgreSQL · Pulumi · RPC · Protobuf
4. 2022 — 2023

   Principal Architect · Luna Protocol

   Designed an automated financial contract execution engine and led the delivery of a mission-critical loan origination system for Aqua Finance, one of the largest home-improvement lenders in the US (c. $2bn in annual originations). Built and mentored the engineering team — growing it from three to six — through a player-coach model.

   Python · FastAPI · Go · EdgeDB · Rust · Pulumi
5. 2019 — 2022

   Senior Developer & Principal Architect · Yobota

   Orchestrated the migration from a legacy monolith to a domain-oriented service architecture — taking releases from a quarterly cadence to stable daily deployments — and led SOC2 Type II technical readiness, establishing the control framework that unlocked Tier 1 banking partnerships. Grew the architecture team from one to four.

   Python · Django · React · PostgreSQL · AWS · Terraform
6. 2013 — 2019

   Earlier · Regents Partners · Protean Capital · Dstl (MoD) · PlebiSite

   Real-time financial data systems on Django Channels for a fund managing c. £500M AUM; ETL pipelines for sensor data classification at the Defence Science & Technology Laboratory; smart-home automation for property management; and a mobile-first analytics startup of my own.

Languages

Python · Rust · Go · TypeScript / React · Next.js

Cloud & Infra

AWS · Azure · GCP · Terraform · Pulumi · Kubernetes

Data

PostgreSQL · EdgeDB · Firestore · MongoDB · Redis

Observability

Datadog · Prometheus · Jenkins · CircleCI · OpenAPI

Education

MSci (Hons.) Physics (2.1) — Imperial College London
Associateship of the Royal College of Science (ARCS)

Languages

English, Italian — native
French, Russian, Spanish — intermediate

Affiliations

Chatham House · Python mentor at Exercism

I write surrealist literary fiction under Alexander Halford Books. My debut novel, Venus In Chains, is a surrealist exploration of meaning, longing, and what we are willing to sacrifice to find them.

The sales and fulfilment platform behind it, I built and run myself — a serverless, event-driven backend handling payments, international shipping with automated customs docs, and per-order DRM injection, alongside a Python-and-Typst pipeline that renders both print files and eBooks from source. A small proof that the architecture holds when I'm the only one on call.

Aside from that: piano, photography, and dancing a lot of Argentine tango.