Chris I Powell logo

Engineering Director with a track record of building and scaling high-performing software teams that deliver measurable business impact. Experienced in technical strategy, architecture, complex delivery, and cross-functional leadership across product, data, design, and commercial teams.

Summary

I lead engineering organisations through growth, platform change, and operational complexity. My work sits at the intersection of delivery, architecture, hiring, and team design, with a focus on helping teams move quickly without losing sight of quality, resilience, or commercial outcomes.

Recent experience includes leading the engineering organisation behind CharlotteTilbury.com and the Charlotte Tilbury app, introducing AI-enabled ways of working, improving reliability, and shaping platform strategy across multiple teams and disciplines.

Core expertise

  • Scaling teams, processes and workstreams with a focus on delivering business-changing value

  • Translating business strategy into focused technical roadmaps

  • Designing empowered teams that can deliver effectively

  • Balancing operational excellence and strong foundations with nimble new development

  • Pragmatic adoption of new technologies, including Generative AI, with clear value and cost awareness

  • Cross-functional leadership across product, design, data, commercial, legal, privacy, and security teams

Selected impact

  • Led the Charlotte Tilbury app from team hiring through to launch, alongside wider marketing platform delivery

  • Introduced GenAI capabilities into engineering workflows and automated parts of internal approvals to streamline adoption of new tools

  • Established an SRE function that reduced error rates by 50% and contributed changes that saved more than 10% of cloud operating spend

  • Replatformed incident management in one week, improving visibility of incidents and follow-up actions across multiple teams

  • Shifted the hiring model toward junior engineers, creating clearer progression paths and growing team diversity from one female engineer to a 60/40 gender split

Experience

Charlotte Tilbury

Engineering Director, January 2023 - present.

Previously Head of Engineering (January 2020 - December 2022), Engineering Manager (January 2019 - December 2020), and Senior Software Engineer (August 2018 - December 2018).

  • Strategic leadership of the engineering team responsible for CharlotteTilbury.com and the Charlotte Tilbury app

  • Ownership of engineering budget, supplier management, security and compliance investment, and platform architecture direction

  • Close collaboration with digital marketing, commercial, design, research, business systems, legal, privacy, and security stakeholders

  • Led platform redesign work to improve resilience, testing, deployment, and readiness for peak demand

WeSwap

Lead Software Engineer, August 2016 - August 2018.

Previously Full Stack Developer, August 2014 - August 2016.

  • Helped evolve a social travel money startup from an Angular and PHP monolith into a service-oriented Node.js platform

  • Redesigned and rebuilt the core exchange and the internal management platform used to manage FX funds

Imperial College London

Computer Scientist, September 2009 - August 2014.

  • Built full-stack systems supporting infectious disease monitoring, including server-side work for the EpiCollect mobile data collection platform

  • Worked closely with scientists and non-scientists, demonstrating the platform to audiences including veterinary teams, academics, emergency responders, and conservationists

Earlier roles

  • Amulet Hotkey Ltd, Contract Software Engineer (April 2009 - September 2009): developed management systems for distributed thin-client environments in investment banking

  • EvanesCo Ltd, Software Engineer (November 2007 - April 2009): developed management systems for remote sensors at a startup spun out of University of Exeter research

  • Devon County Council, Financial Systems Assistant (September 2006 - November 2007): debugged distributed financial spreadsheets and built contract management tooling

Education

  • MSc Autonomous Systems, University of Exeter, 2006

  • BSc (Hons) Internet Computing, University of Exeter, 2005

Contact

Email: chris@chrisipowell.co.uk | LinkedIn: chris-i-powell