One company since 2008, several careers.

I'm Gavin Taylor. I joined ANS (formerly UKFast) as a junior PHP developer in April 2008. Since then I've worked my way up to senior developer, through engineering management, and now Technical Lead for Private Cloud within our R&D department. The company has changed shape a few times over that period, but what's stayed constant is a technical discipline and customer-focused approach, enabling the people I've worked alongside to deliver the best possible systems for our users.

Since its 2013 launch, I've worked primarily on our private cloud IaaS platform that competes directly with industry-leading hyperscalers and other private cloud providers, automating everything from physical hardware deployment and configuration through to PaaS delivery. That spans software engineering, infrastructure, virtualisation, and the operational and architectural decisions that sit above all of it. In practice, that means spending as much time with stakeholders and execs as I do with the engineers actually building things - translating between the two is a large part of the job.

After working with departments across the business during this time, I've got to the point where I can often pre-empt what stakeholders need before they ask. I know our MSP business well enough that I'm rarely just designing to meet an MVP - I'm proposing systems that solve problems stakeholders hadn't realised they had yet.

I've been part of our structured mentoring programme on both sides, first as a mentee and now as a mentor to platform engineers, developers, and tech leads across the business. That's meant helping people work through specific technical challenges, but just as often it's about their personal goals, and helping them build the confidence to back their own judgement.

Before PHP, I spent time in technical phone support - the kind where you need the right information in as few clicks as possible while a customer is waiting on the line. That still shapes how I design automation and interfaces today: it's not enough for a system to work, it needs to surface what a support engineer or customer needs quickly, under pressure, without the guesswork.

Alongside that, I was also building PHP scripts and web applications, first as a hobby and then in my first developer role, learning the craft of software development from the ground up. That combination, understanding both the system and the person under pressure trying to use it, still shows up in how I approach problems today: I want to know why something's actually failing, not just that it did, so I can help the engineers closest to it find the right fix.

For a while, before my role was formally clarified as Technical Lead, I half-jokingly referred to myself as a "Private Cloud Architect" - because that's what the work already was. I was thinking at an enterprise-architecture level: standards, non-functional requirements, designing for the platform as a whole rather than just the next delivery, well before there was an official title or formal framework behind it. Technical Lead is the name on the role, but it functions as an architect role in everything but title.

In 2025, already well into the Technical Lead role, I completed a TOGAF Foundation and Practitioner course. It didn't change the direction I was already heading in, but it accelerated it - tightening the way I approach system design and architecture with a formal structure I've since applied to real work, proposing and shaping enterprise-level architecture within the guardrails set by our Unified Architecture Board.

ANS has already given us the space to learn and use agentic tooling in real work, so for me this isn't about catching up, it's about accelerating - leading from the front rather than following. I use GitHub Copilot for architecture discovery and planning, and both GitHub Copilot and Claude Code for development itself. The focus now is iterating on how we use these tools to improve the way we work and speed up delivery.