Matthew Sanderson
A senior engineering leader with 16 years of experience and a track record of managing teams across the finance, marketing, and technology sectors. My leadership is built on three core pillars: delivering technical innovation to solve complex business problems, enhancing operational efficiency to accelerate delivery, and championing a culture of unwavering technical quality.
Increased Delivery Velocity
Championed a departmental restructure to a project-oriented model, improving workflow and measurably increasing feature throughput.
Critical Project Recovery
Recovered a critical project deployed with significant compliance risk, navigating hurdles to ensure a positive business, technology, and customer outcome.
Data-Driven Management
Pioneered custom AI tools to ensure consistent and equitable application of company performance rubrics, saving time and reducing bias in calibrations.
Risk & Reliability Improvement
Led the re-architecture of the core payment service, consolidating to a single, high-reliability provider (Visa) to de-risk payment processing.
Strategic Innovation
Fostered a culture where the team initiated strategic platform enhancements (Oracle, Aurora) to decouple logic and reduce future upgrade risk.
Complex Domain Leadership
Successfully managed 18+ developers across challenging, highly-regulated domains like Pricing, Underwriting, and Finance.
Professional Experience
Development Manager, Technology Solutions
Auto & General | February 2025 - Present
- Established a "Project Lead" role to build a leadership pipeline and foster end-to-end ownership.
- Transformed team dynamics using Tuckman's model to guide teams through challenges and manage performance.
- Championed a culture of continuous improvement and psychological safety.
Development Manager, Product
Auto & General | June 2022 - January 2025
- Managed 18 developers across 3 teams in Pricing, Underwriting, and Finance.
- Ensured stability, compliance, and strategic evolution of core business systems.
Development Manager, Alliances/Digidex
Auto & General | April 2020 - June 2022
- Tasked with recovering the flagship Roadside 2.0 project post-launch.
- Built two highly effective development teams from the ground up.
Lead Developer/Team Lead
OtherLevels | January 2018 - April 2020
- Spearheaded the complete re-architecture of the core platform from Angular 2 to Angular 12.
- Managed a multi-disciplinary team including developers, QA, and print media resources.
Lead Developer
Fedelta POS | October 2016 - January 2018
- Architected a custom component library and cross-platform framework, reducing delivery time by 30% and code duplication by 60%.
- Enabled rapid release of 3 applications across multiple platforms.
AI Initiatives
Championed the integration of AI tools to enhance and streamline the software development lifecycle.
Established a private, local AI lab to prototype and benchmark the efficiency of custom agents and workflow automations.
Leveraged multiple LLMs (Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude) for rapid prototyping, successfully productionising tools that simplify complex business processes.
Engineered integrations between enterprise platforms like Google's VertexAI and local hardware for secure, on-machine LLM interaction.
Methodology
Servant Leadership
My primary role is to empower and support my team, removing obstacles and providing the resources they need to excel.
Ownership & Accountability
I foster a culture where engineers have true ownership of their products, leading to higher quality work and greater accountability.
Strategic Frameworks
I utilise frameworks like Cynefin for decision-making and Tuckman's Model for deliberate team development.
