Richard
Brammer

I took over an organisation from a Director and merged it with the integration part of my previous organisation (Product UX & Tooling) into one department, which I lead: a 13-person organisation plus contractors, two engineering managers reporting to me, across three product domains in three time zones.

• ◆ Merged the inherited organisation with the integration part of my previous one into a single department; designed its three-domain structure and the engineering-vs-product decision-rights model; accountable product owner (business owner) across all three — five products with many components
• ◆ Led an integrated pre-production version of the infrastructure platform — accounts, network, object storage and ticketing across web console and APIs — presented at a quarterly business review; defined the provider onboarding path
• ◆ Set the platform strategy: internal-first with tenant-aware architecture; co-authored the domain-structure architecture decision
• ◆ Escalated staffing, site-reliability (SRE) and timeline risks to director level ahead of the production target, with explicit risk-acceptance decisions
• ◆ Coordinate annual investment planning (operating and capital) across the three domains and present to VP-level stakeholders; run hiring, coaching and an engineering-excellence forum

I built and led the Product UX & Tooling department — the team behind PlayStation's internal developer and operations tools, used daily by streaming, broadcast, network, test and QA teams in Berlin, Aliso Viejo and Tokyo. Accountable product owner of the tooling platform itself: 19 applications and six widgets, ~150 daily active users at the 2022 baseline.

• ◆ Consolidated eight internal applications into one and retired eleven legacy apps and dashboards (team result, 2024) — platform portfolio cleanup at department scale
• ◆ $300k USD saved in 2025 by moving external software-engineering consultancy from a US vendor to Sony's India site
• ◆ Rolled out the new platform design across all tool teams and retired the legacy public-access infrastructure (2024)
• ◆ Set department strategy on two pillars — shared design system and federated API governance — and grew the integration squad into the infrastructure API mandate
• ◆ Co-authored the developer self-service portal proposal (2023) and ran discovery workshops with engineering managers
• ◆ Built product governance and talent practices from scratch — product catalogue, regular reviews, program structure, role definitions — and hired engineers and an engineering manager across two sites

My first PlayStation team built the internal web applications that operate the PS Now / PS Plus cloud streaming service — real-time live operations at global scale. I ran the team on product principles from day one: owned roadmap, owned backlog.

• ◆ Coordinated the production cutover to the next-generation platform runtime (live 2021) and the migration from local logins to central single sign-on — all production users migrated by 2022
• ◆ Drove the Kubernetes migration and shared the learnings across the cloud platform group (2021); rolled out a shared backend framework across internal services
• ◆ Owned the platform roadmap and backlog end-to-end across framework, identity, security and reliability (2020–2024)
• ◆ Defined reliability targets and set the product operating model that became the basis of the Product UX & Tooling department in 2022

Three years embedded in client organisations as a senior-to-staff-level engineer — most notably Vattenfall in energy. I joined codebases I had not built, unblocked what was stuck, and represented clients towards their own customers on technology, compliance and legal topics.

• ◆ Led 25+ client projects as tech lead across agile delivery, UX-driven development and continuous improvement
• ◆ Vattenfall: decoupled front-end from back-end delivery — deployments went from a fixed twice-daily window to on-demand — and built the API connector that gave customers direct, legally required access to their own data
• ◆ Mentored 20+ engineers and scrum masters across client teams
• ◆ First fully remote engagements — the working model that defined these years

I co-founded a digital agency for mobile publishing — apps, websites and interactive magazines for clients such as Audi, Rolling Stone, Auto Bild and Axel Springer. In the early years I ran every business function myself: sales, finance, hiring, delivery, client management. A co-CEO joined for the final four years; we sold the agency profitably.

• ◆ Shipped 40+ apps and digital products, including award-winning editions for Audi, Rolling Stone and Auto Bild
• ◆ Rewrote the Axel Springer entitlement server — removing SQL-injection and plaintext-password risks while keeping subscribers and business rules intact
• ◆ Launched our own product, Crate magazine: six editions, App Store featured
• ◆ Ran full P&L responsibility end-to-end and sold the agency profitably to a successor

An industrial and software engineering services firm put me in charge of a regional branch at 26, with full profit-center responsibility. The site was loss-making and unstructured when I arrived.

• ◆ Turned the branch to break-even within 12 months
• ◆ Structured the unorganised site into 4 functional departments
• ◆ Grew the branch to 40 staff (peak 2008) across engineering, project management, customer success and operations