Chris Marks
Engineering leadership / retail media / advisory
Engineering and data teams in Bristol and London, >€230M a year. I also take advisory work on the same problems for other businesses.
The platform runs sponsored listings and promotional campaigns across every market, on web and in the native iOS and Android apps. On top of that sits the tooling advertisers use to run campaigns, and the data behind targeting and measurement. It is the second largest revenue stream in the company.
Two sponsored listings platforms, one PHP and one .NET, doing the same job for the same advertisers. I led the consolidation into one platform, which then carried the revenue line up by around 23% to >€210M. The teams were spread across six countries: the UK, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Germany, Israel and Ukraine.
Getting a change out used to take over a month. The teams now deliver 40+ changes a day. Out of hours on call is unified, the change failure rate is below 2%, and employee engagement scores went up through the change.
Several newer parts of the business were sharing an app experience that was not built for them. I argued they needed their own teams and their own shape, made the case at director and CTO level, and was given ownership to prove it. I took it from zero to three teams. The pilot proved the case, and it still runs today.
I led the technology side of the RFP for a specialist third party ad server, alongside a product counterpart. Requirements, commercial evaluation, selection, onboarding, and the integration work that followed signature.
I was one of the first in the business to adopt agentic coding. Built into how the teams work, typical story delivery went from over 20 working days to under two. I am now on spec driven development: automating the path from UX design through product and engineering specification, into build and production, with manual approval before release.
Team structure, the engineering manager layer, hiring, operating model, performance management.
Assessing partners and deal structures, and costing the engineering work before the deal is signed.
What to build on your own inventory and data, in what order, and who you need to run it.
Revenue from confirmation, tracking and receipt surfaces, without putting the core transaction at risk.
Getting agentic workflows into a delivery organisation, with the review gates and measurement to keep them honest.
Two platforms, two teams, one roadmap. Consolidation without stalling the revenue.
An honest read on the health of an engineering organisation, before a deal or after one.
I still build. I architected, designed and built a platform for independent medical practitioners: content managed websites, ecommerce, client and consultation records, and the privacy controls health data requires. It was designed to be discipline agnostic, so the same platform also powers dance studios.
Small systems, real users, built end to end with AI tooling assisting rather than driving. It keeps me current and hands on. New models, agents and tooling get tried here first, and only what holds up goes anywhere near a production team.
I started my first business at university, an ISP running on its own ASN. In 2016 I built a platform that generated mobile apps from a database or a defined schema, predating today's AI generated code.
The last seven years have been engineering leadership. Before retail media I led a cross functional team owning business critical checkout components across the UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
At an insurance comparison business I was responsible for the team that integrated all core products with the systems around them. I was also the first person from the engineering department to win Mentor of the Year, for mentoring the company's first degree apprenticeship cohort, and every one after it. Before that, at an edtech company, I grew a development office from 6 people to 22 and led two development sites. BSc Computer Science, University of Exeter.
Tell me what you are weighing up: an ads business, a vendor decision, a platform consolidation, or an engineering organisation that is not delivering.
chris@chrismarks.co.uk