Zachary Claret-Scott

Leading the PHP development for a data platform serving global manufacturers. I coordinate with teams to keep the import pipeline performing well at scale, while also driving the PHP modernisation effort and maintaining our dev tooling.

I founded and have run a commercial UK web hosting company for over 9 years, owning the full commercial and operational picture: client relationships, contracts, supplier management, and all business decisions. The business operates under Cyber Essentials with GDPR-compliant infrastructure for paying clients. I handle on-call, write runbooks, and run post-incident reviews. On the technical side I manage the full stack: Proxmox, Ansible, OpenTofu, NixOS, with observability via VictoriaMetrics, Grafana, and Loki. Winning 'Web Hosting Company of the Year 2024' validated the operational standards I've built up over nearly a decade.

Brought in as the sole engineer to build MachineKeeper from scratch. Introduced Git and CI/CD to the business, set up proper backups, and moved everything to a big cloud provider. Also modernised the existing TurfKeeper platform.

Hired to transition from agency to in-house development. Helped maintain CI/CD, deployment workflows, and dev environments. Ran daily standups, implemented proper code review processes, and mentored the team. Met with stakeholders regularly to keep them updated and take business decisions back to the tech team.

Founded at uni and grew it to a 9-person agency. Handled all the hiring, onboarding, and performance reviews, plus timesheets, payroll, and invoices. Managed all the tech for the company alongside client relationships, project scoping, and commercial decisions. Worked with clients across the UK and USA.

Selected through a competitive university scholarship. Developed and maintained a custom Android ROM for a specialist hardware security product, working at a low level to integrate software with embedded hardware.

Provided IT support to students and staff. Also helped co-lead a campus-wide hardware audit.

Worked part-time on the development team, mostly migrating client websites to Laravel and upgrading older codebases.

Built and maintain a home lab using professional-grade infrastructure tooling: Proxmox, Ansible, OpenTofu, and NixOS. It's my test environment for validating infrastructure changes before production deployment.

Built a weather monitoring system that logs data from my weather station and UK river levels from the gov API into VictoriaMetrics with custom Grafana dashboards. Demonstrates my approach to observability and data visualisation.

Developing a Terraform module for SMTP2GO resource management, applying infrastructure-as-code principles to email services.

Built Scrobble With, a web app that synchronizes Last.fm scrobbles between users in real-time. It allows groups to maintain shared music histories and demonstrates solving a real user need.

Created Student Finance Countdown, a web tool displaying the next Student Finance England payment date with a live countdown. Solves a common problem students face.

I sit on the panel that reviews and recommends councillor allowances each year. We look at comparative data from surrounding councils and produce formal recommendations. This is a remunerated civic role.

I work the polling stations for local and national elections: checking voter ID, helping the public through the process, and handling station setup and close. This is a remunerated civic role.

I re-founded the university's defunct Computer Science Society and grew it to 60+ members with a 300-strong online community. I ran weekly events including hackathons and workshops, and the society is still going today.

I am doing this part-time to deepen my knowledge of network and communications to complement my real-world experience. The course covers cloud architecture, networking, security, and infrastructure-as-code, and includes Azure certification prep (AZ-900, AZ-104, DP-900, AI-900).

I specialised in Robotic Systems in my final year. My dissertation was on fault-tolerant communication protocols for autonomous robots in unreliable field environments, basically keeping systems working when connectivity drops and things go wrong.

A conference paper on a Tinder-style app I helped build to improve how final-year students are matched with dissertation supervisors. The old manual process left over 40% of students with none of their five preferred supervisors. Our system gamified the selection, giving students real-time choice from the available pool and improving both efficiency and satisfaction.