Zachary Claret-Scott

I own the data import pipelines behind a large-scale analysis platform, handling millions of data points a day, and led the migration of the legacy PHP codebase from PHP 5.3 to 8.4. I built a reproducible Vagrant development environment for the team and owned the macOS virtual machine estate in AWS, with an outbound proxy for egress control. I ran an internal security audit and penetration test, fixing the issues it surfaced including several GDPR gaps. I also brought AI into our day to day work, building MCP servers for internal tools and setting up automated passes for code review and data analysis.

I run Claret-Scott & Co, an independent consultancy working directly with UK clients, and through it enhost, my award-winning commercial web hosting business, which I have run since 2016. I own the full client relationship end to end: scoping, commercials, delivery, and ongoing support, and I advise clients on GDPR so that what I build for them stands up to scrutiny. On the hosting side I own the whole commercial and operational picture: client relationships, contracts, supplier management, and all business decisions, with the business registered with the ICO and infrastructure hosted entirely in the UK. I handle on-call, runbooks, and post-incident reviews, and make hosting decisions on cost and complexity grounds rather than fashion. I have also guided various clients through AI adoption, implementing automated workflows and branded in-app chatbots built on custom system prompting.

I was brought in as the sole engineer to build MachineKeeper from scratch, owning the engineering function and its reporting line into the leadership team. I introduced Git and CI/CD to the business, set up backup processes, and ran backup servers across providers behind Cloudflare to prevent downtime. I managed the external teams we worked with, and migrated TurfKeeper from unmanaged Azure VMs onto infrastructure as code in Google Cloud. Between them the platforms served thousands of golf courses across Europe and tens of thousands of active users.

I was hired to transition from agency to in-house development, replacing a 7-person external team with 3 internal engineers. I took ownership of CI/CD, deployment workflows, and dev environments, managing 180 VMs in AWS. I was part of the hiring process for the new team and handled onboarding, ran daily standups and regular 1:1s, implemented code review, and mentored the engineers, one of whom I supported from junior to senior. I met stakeholders regularly to take business decisions back to the team.

I founded it at university and grew it to an award-winning 9-person agency. Several of the part-time student staff I hired stayed with the company and moved into full-time engineering roles. I handled all the hiring, onboarding, regular 1:1s, and performance reviews, plus timesheets, payroll, and invoices. I managed all the tech for the company alongside client relationships, project scoping, and commercial decisions, including taking several clients through Cyber Essentials certification on software we built for them, working with clients across the UK and USA.

I have run a home lab since 2009, now three Proxmox nodes across two locations managed with Ansible, OpenTofu, and NixOS, self-hosting Immich, Grafana, AdGuard, n8n, and Home Assistant, and used as a testbed before changes reach production.

I intercept data from an off-the-shelf weather station into VictoriaMetrics alongside UK government river level and air quality data, with two years of history on custom Grafana dashboards.

I built and still maintain a web app that syncs Last.fm scrobbles between users in real time, now being extended to cover radio stations.

Part-time alongside work. Covers cloud architecture, networking, security, and infrastructure-as-code.

I specialised in Robotic Systems, with a dissertation on fault-tolerant communication protocols for autonomous robots in unreliable field environments.