Andi Smith
Technical Leader • Product Focused
Based in London, UK
Hello, I'm Andi
With over 20 years of commercial experience, I am a passionate technical leader who excels at building and scaling high-performing product engineering teams with a focus on business value. I've founded engineering functions from scratch, and scaled an established one from 40 to 110 through two acquisitions to a $2.3 billion CAD exit.
I'm currently building AI-native engineering at Fanalysis.
Latest Blog Posts
Deckchair Vibes
Last week I built and shipped a browser game from a deckchair in Ibiza using nothing but my phone and AI. No laptop. No IDE. No terminal. Just Claude, GitHub and Netlify.
Measure Shipped Work, Not Tokens
If everyone on your team uses AI every day, what does your AI adoption metric actually tell you?
AI to Resolve Incidents
We put an AI bot between our alerting and our on-call engineer. It reads the logs, the traffic and the recent deploys, then comments on the incident before anyone has even opened Slack.
Career Highlights and Achievements
- 1
Building Fanalysis from the ground up
I joined Fanalysis as employee #1, hired to turn an agency-built MVP into a production platform. It soft-launched in ten weeks and was live on Sky Sports broadcasts within six months. I built the engineering function from zero to a team of 20, set the architecture and technical strategy, and took the platform through the 2026 World Cup without a major incident. Today we run agentic development in production: automated bug fixing, ticket triage and AI-assisted incident response.
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- 2
Engineering leadership through two acquisitions at LifeWorks
Brought in to lead the UK & Europe engineering teams, I scaled the organisation from 40 to 110 engineers while driving a full platform transformation - migrating a legacy monolith to microservices and compressing release cycles from monthly to continuous deployment. I established the engineering culture, hiring bar, and delivery processes that made the team acquisition-ready. LifeWorks was acquired twice during my tenure - first for $426M, then by TELUS Health for $2.3B CAD - and I was embedded in the due diligence process for both deals.
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- 3
Unifying humans with AI at Bloom Career Coaching
Bloom was where I got my first blank page: a Series A business where I was the founding engineering hire and built the culture, the architecture and the delivery model the way I thought they should be built. We used AI to enhance human coaching rather than replace it, with guided insights and takeaways from real sessions, and an anytime AI coaching assistant alongside them. I learnt AI worked best as an addition to the coaching relationship, not a substitute for it.
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- 4
Collaborating in Menlo Park with Facebook and Nike
For a partnership between Facebook and Nike, I worked at Facebook's HQ in Menlo Park, California designing and building a new social experience for runners. I gained great insights in to how Facebook build product and the importance of data in decision making. The project was a great success for Nike Women, and the ideas we came up with are still being used today.
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- 5
Launching Heineken Star Player at the Emirates Stadium
Standing in the Emirates stadium watching a room full of sports journalists be the first to play Heineken Star Player was an incredible moment in my career. The game allowed football fans to predict the outcome of events occuring in live football matches in real-time with the chance of winning tickets to the Champions League final. I led development of this six month project which released to coincide with the Champions League season. I learnt a lot about latency, sockets and the science of football!
Heineken Star Player was a huge success and won numerous awards including a Cannes Gold Lion.
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- 6
Leading the MINI and BMW dev teams in Munich
I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to spend six months in Munich with the MINI and BMW teams leading development of a new car configurator for MINI built with AngularJS. The car configurator was a key part of the sales process for MINI and featured prominently on their websites. The project was a great success and was later adapted for use on the BMW website too. As part of the engagement, I also upskilled the internal BMW engineering team - ensuring they had the knowledge and confidence to own and evolve the solution long after my involvement ended.
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- 7
Being on the cover of Net Magazine... twice!
In 2013 I became known as a bit of an expert when it came to debugging web applications. I had given several talks on the subject and was running a website resource to help developers. I was asked by UK publication Net Magazine to write a six-page cover article on the subject. The article was so well received that I was asked to write a follow-up article two years later. I also wrote a number of other articles for the magazine on other subjects such as web workflows.
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- 8
Performing improv comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe
Since 2023 I've been performing improv, with a week-long run at the Edinburgh Fringe and sell-out shows at Brighton Fringe. Improv turns out to be the closest thing I've found to a training ground for leadership: you listen properly because you have to build on what someone else just gave you, you commit to a decision without complete information, and when the plan falls apart in front of an audience you keep going. I've become a better listener, quicker on my feet, and far more comfortable being wrong in public. All of which show up in how I run a team and a room.
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- 9
Founding independent games studio Natomic Studios
While studying Computer Science I founded Natomic Studios, an independent games studio that shipped 19 titles between 2000 and 2004. I built the games, the brand and the community around them, and designed retention mechanics well before that was a discipline with a name: unlockable parts to customise your tank across titles, and leaderboards to keep players competing. The games were downloaded over a million times and we had a great community of players who frequented the Natomic Studios forums. My first lesson in shipping product, building an audience, and keeping them.
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- 10
Presenting across the world
I'm fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to speak in front of audiences around the world. After presenting at a number of meetups in London, I was asked to speak at a conference in San Francisco with my friend at Mozilla, Dave Hunt. It was my first visit to the US and my first conference talk. But it kicked started a love of presenting and I've since spoken at many other conferences.
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