Josh Irish
Senior Software Engineer | IT & Engineering Leader
Professional Summary
20 years of professional software engineering and tech leadership experience, all within 2 companies. Lately I've been running teams, hiring, and still writing code for proof of concepts for solutions to the most complicated system problems that crop up. I have a knack for creative problem solving. Experienced in latest AI tools while still keeping a close eye on the produced code for security and quality. Most of my recent work has been automating internal business workflows: around 70% of Venue Kings profit came from end-to-end automated pipelines I built. Recently moved back to the UK after a decade in Canada. After 3 years as CTO I'm looking for a calmer, remote senior engineering role. Fluent in English and Spanish.
Professional Experience
Entire career spent at two companies: MessageCloud (2006 – 2017, Plymouth, UK), then Venue Kings (2017 – 2025, North Vancouver, BC).
Venue Kings, North Vancouver, BC
Chief Technical Officer
2022 – Oct 2025
- Technical Strategy: Owned the full technology roadmap. Decided where engineering effort went based on what actually moved the business, and reported to ownership on delivery, risk, and spend.
- System Automation: Built out automation across buying, pricing, listing, fulfillment, and support. By the time I left, around 70% of company profit came from pipelines that ran without a human touching them.
- AI & LLM Integration: Rolled out LLM-powered tooling for content generation, support triage, and internal ops workflows, with guardrails, evaluation harnesses, and cost controls around third-party model APIs.
- Team Leadership: Ran a team of 10 engineers across backend, frontend, and ops. Owned code review standards, 1:1s, and career development.
- Hiring: Personally hired every member of the dev team. Built the interview loops, scorecards, and onboarding that cut ramp time and mis-hires.
- Architecture: Designed event-driven services with queues, caching, and idempotent processing. The platform stayed up through major peak-event traffic spikes.
- Security: Put least-privilege IAM, secret rotation, and audit logging in place. Oversaw vendor reviews, PCI-adjacent payment flows, and DR planning.
- Budget & Vendors: Negotiated cloud and SaaS contracts, cutting spend year over year even as the platform grew.
Venue Kings, North Vancouver, BC
Head of IT
2019 – 2022
- Project Delivery: Planned work across multiple teams, set milestones, and got releases out reliably across concurrent projects.
- DevOps & CI/CD: Built automated build/test/deploy pipelines with standardised release, rollback, and blue/green processes. Deploy lead time dropped from days to minutes.
- Observability & Operations: Set up metrics, logging, and alerting across services. Introduced on-call rotations and blameless postmortems, and reliability improved steadily after.
- Infrastructure: Migrated production workloads to containerised infrastructure on AWS, with Docker and infrastructure-as-code for every environment.
- Internal IT & Tooling: Ran all internal IT (SSO, device management, backups, networking) alongside product engineering responsibilities.
Venue Kings, North Vancouver, BC
Lead Developer
2017 – 2019
- Founding Engineer: Built the first version of the internal platform from scratch, covering inventory, listing, and order processing across multiple sales channels.
- Marketplace Integrations: Integrated eBay, Amazon, Shopify, and payment provider APIs; handled rate limits, retries, and reconciliation.
- Data Model & Reporting: Designed the core relational schema and reporting queries that the business still runs on today.
MessageCloud, Plymouth, UK
Senior Software Engineer
2013 – 2017
- High-Volume APIs: Designed and maintained HTTP APIs and webhook flows handling millions of daily messaging and payment transactions across global carriers.
- Distributed Systems: Built fault-tolerant pipelines using queues, retries, and idempotent processing. Kept critical paths highly available across data centres.
- Database Optimisation: Led development of a custom query log analysis system. The resulting index and schema changes cut database load by around 90%.
- System Administration: Day-to-day sysadmin work on Debian and Red Hat Linux, AWS, master-replica MySQL topologies, iptables, and general security hardening.
- Mentoring & Code Quality: Reviewed code and mentored junior and mid-level engineers. Pushed better testing and documentation habits across the team.
- CI/CD & Testing: Introduced automated testing and deploy workflows that reduced regressions and improved release cadence.
- Remote Collaboration: Worked in a distributed, asynchronous team across UK, EU, and North American time zones for most of an 11-year tenure. The final 2 years were fully remote from Toronto and Vancouver, Canada.
MessageCloud, Plymouth, UK
Software Engineer
2009 – 2013
- Product Engineering: Built new features across the messaging and billing platform. Owned components end-to-end from spec to production.
- Client Integration: Worked directly with enterprise clients to integrate and debug their systems, adapting to whichever language and protocol they used.
- On-Call & Incident Response: Part of the core engineering on-call rotation. Diagnosed and resolved production issues against live traffic.
MessageCloud, Plymouth, UK
Technical Support
2006 – 2009
- Customer Support: First line of technical support for clients integrating SMS and payment APIs. Debugged issues across HTTP, SMPP, and carrier protocols.
- Tooling: Wrote internal diagnostic scripts and dashboards that cut ticket resolution times, and eventually slid me into full engineering.
Skills & Technologies
| Area | Skills & Tools |
|---|---|
| Languages | PHP, JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js, Python, Go, C#, SQL, Bash/Shell, HTML/CSS |
| Frameworks & Libraries | Laravel, Express.js, React, Vue.js, Next.js, Django, Flask, jQuery, Bootstrap, Tailwind |
| Databases | MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, SQLite, ElasticSearch |
| Cloud & DevOps | AWS, Linux (Debian/Red Hat), Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Git/GitHub, CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Jenkins), Load Balancing, Infrastructure as Code, Observability (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK) |
| Architecture | Distributed Systems, High Availability, Microservices, Event-Driven Patterns, Message Queues (RabbitMQ, SQS), API Design (REST, Webhooks), Caching Strategies |
| AI & Automation | LLM API integration (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini), prompt engineering, evaluation harnesses, browser & workflow automation, retrieval & embeddings (basic) |
| Payments & Integrations | Stripe, carrier billing, marketplace APIs (eBay, Amazon, Shopify), OAuth2, webhooks, reconciliation & idempotency |
| Leadership | Running small teams, hiring & interviewing, mentoring, Scrum/Kanban, roadmap planning, remote/async collaboration |
| Security & Compliance | IAM & Least Privilege, Secrets Management, Network Security, Audit Logging, Disaster Recovery, SOC 2 / PCI-DSS familiarity, GDPR awareness |
Education & Certifications
- BSc Computer Science, University of Glamorgan, UK (2002 – 2006) · 2:1
- Linux System Administration (RHCSA preparation), Langara College, Vancouver, BC (2018)
- Certificate in Cloud Architecture on AWS, British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT), Burnaby, BC (2019)