Joseph Odanmen

I’m getting more questions around inside vs outside IR35 rate cards across AI & Data roles, so here’s a grounded view of what’s landing across the M4 corridor. This is based on live conversations with contractors and hiring managers. AI Architect designs and oversees the strategic implementation of AI across the organisation. Outside IR35: £750–£900/day | Inside IR35: £850–£1,000/day What drives rates: enterprise scale, ownership of AI strategy, governance, stakeholder influence, and accountability beyond delivery. Machine Learning Engineer designs, builds, deploys and maintains ML systems in production. Outside IR35: £550–£700/day | Inside IR35: £650–£800/day What drives rates: production ML experience, real pipelines, reliability, and impact beyond notebooks. MLOps Engineer builds and runs platforms that deploy, monitor and manage ML models in production. Outside IR35: £600–£750/day | Inside IR35: £700–£850/day What drives rates: ownership of the full model lifecycle, platform stability, incident response, and ability to operate at scale. Data Scientist applies statistics, engineering and domain knowledge to solve business problems. Outside IR35: £450–£600/day | Inside IR35: £550–£700/day What drives rates: commercial outcomes, stakeholder communication, and influence on decision-making, not just modelling. A few market realities worth calling out. For contractors, the decision between inside and outside IR35 usually comes down to overall take-home, contract length, and how clearly defined the work is, not just the headline day rate. For hiring managers, getting the IR35 determination right upfront is key. When this is done accurately, especially with an agency that has a clear IR35 assessment process in place, it reduces risk, avoids rework, and often leads to better quality contractors and stronger value for money. If useful, I’m happy to share how teams are structuring roles to attract strong talent without overpaying. #IR35 #AIJobs #DataCareers #ContractorsUK #HiringManagers

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Why software engineers must give PEER REVIEWS the same level of importance and focus they would give while they fix a production issue.

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Tech salaries are shifting fast in 2025. We’ve seen a clear trend across the UK: - Mid-level engineers are flatlining - Seniors and specialists (AI, data, platform) are surging - London pay is no longer outpacing the rest of the UK by default Hiring managers: If your salary bands are based on 2022 numbers, you're probably missing out on great people - or losing them at offer stage. Get the full breakdown in our 2025 UK Tech Salary Report (link in comments) 👇

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During Rails developer interviews, performance optimisation knowledge consistently separates candidates who receive offers from those who don't. Our clients tell us that developers who understand production performance characteristics command 15-25% higher salaries. Performance skills employers prioritise: 🔹 Identifying N+1 queries and implementing eager loading solutions 🔹 Understanding database indexing strategies for frequently queried columns 🔹 Implementing effective caching strategies (fragment, Russian doll, HTTP) 🔹 Using profiling tools like Bullet, Scout, or New Relic 🔹 Optimising background job processing to maintain responsive applications Technical leads at our client companies consistently mention that candidates who can discuss real-world performance challenges they've solved stand out significantly during technical assessments. Why performance knowledge matters for your career: Senior Rails positions almost always require demonstrated performance optimisation experience. The ability to discuss how you've improved response times, reduced memory usage, or scaled applications proves you've worked on production systems at scale. Developers who've used APM tools and can articulate their findings during interviews demonstrate production experience that junior developers lack. This distinction directly impacts compensation negotiations. Career development insight: If you're currently in a junior or mid-level Rails role, volunteering to investigate performance issues provides valuable experience that accelerates career progression. Our placement data shows developers with documented performance improvement projects receive significantly more interview requests. What performance challenges have you tackled in your Rails career? We're connecting developers who understand production optimisation with companies valuing this expertise. #RailsPerformance #CareerDevelopment #RubyOnRails #TechSkills #TechRecruitment

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Senior QA Automation Engineer (IC5) — On-site in Sofia (BG) or Norwich (UK) About Epos Now Global POS and fintech platform serving 77,000+ businesses. From payments and retail to AI-driven insights, we build scalable tech that helps merchants trade smarter and grow faster. Engineering works in domain tribes with a product mindset—quality is built in. Role Purpose Define and drive platform-wide automation and quality strategy. High-impact, hands-on role building scalable, resilient, observable automation that enables fast, confident releases across squads. Operate beyond a single team to ensure frameworks, CI/CD, and quality gates are sustainable and reliable. Mandate Reduce systemic risk Eliminate flakiness Shorten feedback loops Embed measurable quality signals into SDLC What You’ll Do Platform automation architecture Design, build, evolve UI, API, integration, and non-functional automation (Playwright/Cypress/Selenium; API/contract; Appium; perf). Make frameworks resilient, observable, and maintainable; drive near-zero flake. CI/CD and release engineering Integrate automation into GitLab CI (or similar) with fast, deterministic pipelines. Add quality gates, canaries/rollbacks, and actionable signals; cut release risk. Quality governance and standards Standardize strategy (pyramid/trophy, risk-based), own regression health and metrics. Remove single points of failure via documentation and knowledge sharing. Technical leadership and influence Lead cross-squad QA initiatives; contribute to architecture forums. Shape Definition of Done; influence planning and release decisions; run reviews. Coaching and enablement Mentor QAs/engineers; run workshops/guilds; drive shift-left and fast feedback. Continuous improvement Analyze recurring defects/systemic weaknesses; improve stability, speed, trust. Tech Environment Stack: Golang, C#, React (TypeScript) Platform: AWS, Kubernetes/Helm, Terraform CI/CD: GitLab CI Tooling: Playwright/Cypress, REST/contract (Pact), k6, OTel/Prometheus/Grafana, Sentry Essential Experience 4+ years in QA automation or SWE with strong CI/CD automation. Built/maintained UI and API frameworks (TS/JS, C#, or Go). Proven flake reduction and pipeline reliability improvements. Solid testing strategy; Docker; basic AWS; strong collaboration and comms. Nice to Have Fintech/payments/POS; Pact; k6; Terraform/K8s; security/PCI; test analytics dashboards. Success (6–12 months) e2e flake <1%; CI pass ≥99%; faster pipelines. Shorter regressions via better pyramid and risk-based selection. Higher automated coverage on critical paths; fewer escaped defects. Standards adopted across multiple squads. Contact: [email protected] https://lnkd.in/ehHVg5aZ

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this is an interesting take and there are some pretty impactful things that claude skills can do, but they run isolated with no outside network access, so they serve a different purpose than mcp does. yes skills are more elegant, but also can't do the same things as MCP. API & MCP serve different purposes from each other as well. I think MCP serves massive value (but needs governance via a catalog & mcp gateway) Yes try out skills and figure out which logic belongs where!

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Hiring contractors can be a brilliant way to add speed and flexibility, but getting the setup right is crucial. IR35 responsibility now sits with most employers, and even one misclassified contractor can lead to significant unexpected costs. For a contractor on a £500 day rate, that can range between £31,746 and £48,840 a year in estimated unpaid tax, NI and penalties. A bit of clarity upfront on engagement routes, documentation and compliance goes a long way. We’ve put together a clear, simple guide to help teams approach contractor hiring with confidence. If you’d like a copy, just let me know! #socialscaling #contractor #IR35 #newjob #recruitment #software #mechanical #manufacturing #electronics

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London Microservices Event - Q2 2025 Speaker announcement. Our first speaker for next Wednesday's event is David Denton. David is the Co-creator of the popular http4k platform, a recognised Kotlin Google Developer Expert, and an Open-Source enthusiast. His talk is titled "Functional Intelligence: Agents, MCP and the end of the Web(?)" David's talk will explore a future where autonomous systems, powered by standardised protocols, transform how we interact with digital services and fundamentally reshape the human web experience. Instead of humans adapting to clunky UIs and processes, intelligent agents handle these tasks by directly communicating with each other. MCP is hot right now, and if you are looking to understand what is happening in this space or expand on what you know already, you won't want to miss this talk. Sign up using the link below. https://lnkd.in/dTjcWbdE

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“Rank and File Developer Hiring will be dead in Western locations in two years. Developers just don’t know it yet.” As told to me by a global head of recruitment / TA at a major FS firm on Friday night. AI/Tech-enabled leadership hiring in NY/London or similar. Small numbers, big comp, big impact Dev Teams in emerging economies eg: India. AI throughout Just his opinion. Others will say doom mongering I’m sure. I think I agree with him though. Hard to see a different outcome at this stage. Thoughts?

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🚦 T+1 settlement isn’t just a regulatory change, it’s a software engineering capacity challenge. As the UK and Europe move to T+1 by October 2027, settlements and post‑trade technology teams are dealing with compressed timelines, heavier integration workloads, and far less tolerance for manual processes or delivery risk. I’m supporting Markets and Securities Technology leaders by helping them scale software engineering capacity safely, protect BAU, and deliver complex post‑trade change through 2026–27. If you’re planning for T+1, settlement modernisation, or post‑trade automation, happy to share what we’re seeing across the market. #TPlus1 #PostTrade #SettlementTechnology #MarketsTechnology #SoftwareEngineering #FinTech #RegulatoryChange

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Exciting times are coming in the Fin-Tech world when it comes to Cybersecurity! 📈 UK FinTech hiring is set to grow 32% in 2025 — despite economic headwinds. New research highlights a strategic shift: FinTechs are scaling teams to meet rising regulatory demands, tackle financial threats, and modernise legacy systems. 🔒 Risk & compliance hiring is forecast to rise 29%, with: Financial crime roles up 50% Fraud-related hiring doubling 💻 Tech hiring is also booming — up 39% — driven by demand for: Cybersecurity Engineering IT leadership London remains the hiring hub, supported by regulatory reforms like the Cyber Security & Resilience Bill. #FinTech #HiringTrends #UKTech #Compliance #CyberSecurity #RegTech #RiskManagement

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This evening's work for Claude, on Patches: 1) Thinking over a couple of API decisions I recorded yesterday, I realised there were cleaner approaches available to one particular aspect, piggy-backing on previous changes. I proposed those approaches to the LLM, talked them through, considered objections, settled on a new approach; the LLM wrote up the revised ADR (which I read, checking that it captured my intention clearly) 2) The method that compares a new patch graph to the existing one and builds an updated execution plan is huge, nested and complex. I would never have written it that way myself, but it works as it stands. Nevertheless, I have future changes targeting that area, and it's risky to have something that's both syntactically convoluted and hard to read and test, especially in such a central piece of logic. It badly needs some attention. I asked the LLM to propose a breakdown of the method into smaller, testable pieces. Its proposal was ok, but missed an opportunity to separate cleanly the "deciding what to do" phase from the "acting on the decision" phase, leaving graph analysis and new module instantiation somewhat tangled up with each other. I suggested some further re-organisation to disentangle things, and asked the LLM to remark on the impact this would have on testing; it confirmed that it would make the testable surface of each of the distinct pieces smaller and more easy to control. Once we had a scheme that looked sound to me, I asked it to write up an epic and a sequence of tickets for it. Then I asked it to start working through the changes. Now it's chugging through the first ticket, while I write this. It will go on doing so while I pop downstairs and do the washing-up. I'm comfortable with the fact that the first draft of the code it's now tidying up was unsatisfactory from a testability and maintainability point of view: it grew organically and expediently in the course of pulling together something that worked well enough for me to start playing with it. Now it's a glaring area of technical risk, so I'm cheaply and quickly addressing it. A capable human developer would have kept much better discipline throughout the drafting process, but might not have seen that the decide/action split was natural and desirable until about this point in the game - I didn't until I stopped to think about it. What's absent from this process, for me, is anxiety that the LLM will just heap up piles of intractable slop. It will typically do the expedient thing at each step along the way, but that's fine if you're working in short iterations provided you're also periodically stopping to review where cruft and friction are accumulating. What it lacks in foresight, you somewhat have to make up for in hindsight. But the latter is famously somewhat clearer than the former anyway.

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🦄 𝟲 𝗨𝗞 𝗔𝗜 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗽𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗙𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝘁𝗼 𝗨𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗻 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝘁𝘂𝘀 The UK is an emerging global hub for AI, here are a couple companies to keep on your radar: Fetch.ai (Cambridge) 📈 Funding: $112M | Founded: 2017 An open marketplace for AI Agents. Fetch.ai empowers developers to build multi-agent systems that can securely access datasets and operate autonomously. Founders: Humayun Sheikh, Toby Simpson, Thomas Hain Nscale (London) 🖥️ Funding: $185M | Founded: 2023 A “hyperscaler” purpose-built for AI and HPC. Nscale is redefining infrastructure with a bold focus on sustainable, high-performance computing for the AI era. Founder: Josh Payne Sylvera (London) 🌎 Funding: $97M | Founded: 2020 Using AI to assess and accelerate climate investments. Sylvera provides high-integrity carbon data and tools to drive better net-zero decisions. Founders: Allister Furey, Samuel Gill QuantoPay (London) 💷 Funding: $168M | Founded: 2016 Blockchain meets banking. QuantoPay is a next-gen fintech platform focused on transparency, security, and global transactions without hidden fees. Founder: Dr. Alexander B. bit.bio (Cambridge) 🔬 Funding: $175M | Founded: 2016 Revolutionising biotech with deterministic cell programming. Bit.bio is using AI to engineer human cells for therapies, research, and regenerative medicine. Founders: Mark Kotter, Florian Schuster UrbanChain (Manchester) ⚡ Funding: $75M | Founded: 2017 Challenging the traditional energy monopoly, UrbanChain offers peer-to-peer green energy trading, making renewable power both affordable and accessible. Founder: Somayeh Taheri #UKTech #AIStartups #AINews #ArtificialIntelligence #Startups

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Most #DevOps Manager roles are not actually #DevOps roles. They are meetings, process and people management with very little time left for engineering. This one is different. I am working with a business in London that wants someone who can still get stuck into the platform while helping a small team improve how they operate. The platform has grown over the past decade and now needs someone to help take it to the next level. AWS, Kubernetes, Python. Real opportunity to modernise things properly rather than just maintain what is already there. It is roughly a 50 50 split between hands on engineering and leadership. Salary sits around £100k to £105k with two days in the office. If you enjoy building and improving platforms rather than just talking about them, this could be worth a conversation. Drop me a message if you are curious.

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If you’re working through acquisition or integration and haven’t reviewed your resourcing plan, you’re already behind. We speak to private equity-backed companies weekly who need: - A Transformation Director tomorrow - Data & tech capability yesterday - IR35-compliant contract teams without drama The earlier we’re brought into the conversation, the more value we can add. Because yes we can fill gaps fast. But the biggest returns come when we’re part of the plan, not the patch-up.

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