A personal account of technical leadership across event-driven NaPTAN ingestion and controlled permanent stop removal.
John Mikel Amiel Regida
Lead Data Architect | Software engineer, data infrastructure and AI platforms
London, UK | UK work authorization, no sponsorship needed | johnmikelregida@gmail.com
johnmikelregida.com |
github.com/johnmikel |
linkedin.com/in/johnmikelregida
London-based data architect and technical lead with more than ten years building data platforms, backend services, and cloud infrastructure with Python, TypeScript, and Google Cloud. I have led teams on Great Britain's national record of public transport stops and an AI ontology generator for government content. I also lead the platform architecture of Brick Rewards, a UK app that rewards renters for paying rent. I am looking for Senior or Staff software engineer roles in data infrastructure and AI platforms.
Experience
Founding Platform Architect | Brick Rewards | London, UK
- Lead the platform architecture in a small team for an app used by 17,000+ renters, plus its partners and operators: member apps on iOS and Android, partner and admin web tools, TypeScript backend services, an open-banking data pipeline, and Google Cloud infrastructure in Terraform.
- Led rent verification end to end, from open-banking data to points in the member app: zero false overdue rent alerts through a two-day bank data outage (1,634 checks deferred, not guessed) and 94x less data scanned per sync.
- Set the path every change takes to production: reviewed CI that promotes one build from staging to test to production, automated user journey tests as a hard gate, and approval before release.
- Defined the controls for any change to points or gift card balances: a preview, a named operator and reason, before and after values, idempotency, an audit record, and a reversal path.
Lead Consultant / Lead Data Architect | Thoughtworks | Sep 2021-present | London, UK
Ontology generator alpha | UK central government digital organisation | Feb 2026-Jun 2026
- Tech-led a team of 4-6 building an alpha that turns published government content into a knowledge graph for discovery, classification, governance, and AI retrieval (RAG).
- Cut ontology drafting from weeks of manual modelling to hours, using Python, an LLM, and RDF/OWL.
NaPTAN, Great Britain's national record of public transport stops | Jan 2023-Jan 2026
- Technically led a multidisciplinary team of 7-12 maintaining and modernising the dataset, aligning engineering, data operations, policy, transport operators, and data consumers.
- Led the move from single-request ingestion to an event-driven pipeline on Google Cloud (Pub/Sub, Cloud Functions, Cloud Run), increasing per-submission file capacity tenfold, with retries and failure isolation per file.
- Led the guarded workflow for permanently removing stops from the national record, with safety checks across datasets, permissions, and an audit trail: at least 75% less processing time and manual support effort, and zero erroneous removals in at least 12 months of production.
Senior Software Engineer | Five Faces / Cloudstaff | Aug 2020-Aug 2021 | Brisbane, AU / Clark, PH
Lead Developer / Architect | Good Computers UK & Good Advice UK | Apr 2019-Mar 2020 | London, UK
Earlier technology leadership and engineering roles | 2015-2019 | Doha, Qatar
Selected engineering evidence
A personal account of founding platform architecture at Brick Rewards: rent verification from open-banking data, a correct and cheap pipeline, and a reviewed path to production.
A deterministic mobile test runner for AI coding agents. One Zig binary drives real iOS and Android targets, returns typed pass or fail, and writes replayable evidence with no LLM in the execution path.
A published case study on incremental modernization with modular architecture.
Skills
Data platforms
Data modelling and validation, data contracts, schema evolution, streaming, batch and backfill design, SQL, PostgreSQL, DuckDB, Parquet
AI and knowledge systems
RAG, embeddings, ontology engineering, grounded retrieval, agent tool contracts, on-device ML, Vertex AI
Cloud and platform engineering
AWS, GCP, Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, observability
Core implementation languages
Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, Java, C#, Rust, C/C++, WebAssembly
Technical leadership
Architecture direction, technical strategy, stakeholder alignment, mentoring, pairing, TDD and BDD
Education and certifications
MSc Computer Science | Arizona State University | In progress
BSc Computer Science | University of the People | 2020
BSc Computer Engineering | University of the Philippines, Diliman | Coursework, 2010-2014
Google Cloud Professional certifications | 5 earned, 2 active | Verify on Credly
Cloud Developer (active, expires May 2027); Data Engineer (active, expires September 2027)
Cloud Architect (earned, expired November 2025); Machine Learning Engineer (earned); Cloud Database Engineer (earned)
Using the Strangler Fig with Mobile Apps | Martin Fowler | 2024 | Co-author