Zachary Claret-Scott

Conker Group turns real-time point-of-sale data from UK retailers into insights for FMCG brands and their national account teams, within minutes of the data arriving.

The platform runs on AWS with a PHP 8.4 codebase, EC2 Mac instances, and Vagrant for local environments, and I use Claude Code and MCP servers day to day.

I work on the data import pipelines, handling millions of data points a day, and led the migration of the legacy codebase from PHP 5.3 to 8.4. Alongside that I built the team's reproducible development environment, look after the macOS estate and its egress proxy, and ran an internal security audit and penetration test, fixing what it found including several GDPR gaps. I brought AI into the team's daily work: agentic coding as part of the workflow, MCP servers for internal tools, and automated AI passes for code review and data analysis.

Claret-Scott & Co is my own consultancy, working directly with UK businesses on bespoke software, security, and GDPR. It is also the company behind enhost, the award-winning web hosting business I have run since 2016.

Technically it runs on Proxmox with LXC containers, Ansible, OpenTofu, and NixOS, monitored with VictoriaMetrics, Grafana, and Loki, with PHP and Laravel for client work and MCP for AI integrations.

I own every client relationship end to end, from scoping and commercials through delivery and ongoing support, and advise on GDPR so that what I build stands up to scrutiny. On the hosting side that extends to contracts, suppliers, on-call, runbooks, and post-incident reviews, on ICO registered infrastructure hosted entirely in the UK. I have also guided clients through AI adoption, from automated workflows to branded in-app chatbots built on custom system prompting.

Origin Amenity Solutions supplies turf care and plant health products to greenkeepers, grounds managers, and local authorities across the UK. It also owns MachineKeeper, a SaaS platform for equipment inspections, and the legacy TurfKeeper platform, which together serve thousands of golf courses across Europe and tens of thousands of users.

Infrastructure was Ansible and Terraform across Google Cloud, Azure, and Cloudflare, with Laravel on the application side and CI/CD pipelines across both.

I was brought in as the sole engineer to build MachineKeeper from scratch, owning the engineering function and reporting into the leadership team. I introduced Git, CI/CD, and standard backups to the business, ran backup servers across providers behind Cloudflare to prevent downtime, managed the external teams we worked with, and migrated TurfKeeper from unmanaged Azure VMs onto infrastructure as code in Google Cloud.

Flo provides recruitment software, payroll, back-office services, and invoice financing to UK temporary recruitment agencies across healthcare, education, industrial, and construction.

The estate was 180 VMs in AWS managed with Ansible, with CI/CD pipelines in front of a Laravel platform on PHP 8.1.

I was hired to move development in-house, replacing a 7-person agency team with 3 internal engineers whom I helped hire and then onboarded. I took ownership of CI/CD, deployment workflows, and dev environments, and ran the team day to day through standups, regular 1:1s, code review, and mentoring, supporting one engineer from junior to senior. Regular stakeholder meetings kept the business informed and brought its decisions back to the team.

Probably Rational was the software agency I founded at university and grew to an award-winning 9-person team, building privacy focused mobile and web apps for clients across the UK and USA.

We built on PHP and Laravel with Flutter for mobile, running on Docker in AWS.

I ran the people side in full: hiring, onboarding, regular 1:1s, performance reviews, timesheets, payroll, and invoicing. Several of the part-time students I hired stayed on and moved into full-time engineering roles. I also managed the technology, client relationships, scoping, and commercial decisions, including taking several clients through Cyber Essentials certification on software we built for them.

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.