Andi Smith

Building tech that empowers football fans.

Employee #1 hired to transform agency MVP prototype to a production ready platform supporting Sky Sports and DAZN broadcast partnerships. Taking an industry-first football social network and fan data platform from concept to national broadcast integration in six months, establishing technical foundation for application that is now reaching millions of Premier League and La Liga viewers weekly.

• Built the engineering function from zero - defining technical strategy, hiring, development practices and product roadmap to enable rapid product-market fit iteration and partnership execution. Scaled team to 20 front, backend, QA and infrastructure engineers.
• Pioneered AI-powered scalable fan sentiment integration into live TV broadcasts.
• Scaled platform to handle over 100k users; 40k requests per minute and 500 requests per second during high traffic event spikes from broadcast promotions and ads; including World Cup support with zero major incidents, validating platform stability at scale.
• Increased engineering velocity by 50%+ through strategic AI adoption (Claude Code, agentic workflows) leading to productivity gains of 300k lines of code per month whilst maintaining quality standards.
• Championed use of AI tools CodeRabbit and Incident.io to catch code issues early and installed guardrails to ensure AI led code was held to the highest quality standards.
• Developed novel AI powered avatar generation system adopted by 90% of users that creates personalised fan identities based on team allegiance, differentiating user experience and strengthening community engagement.
• Led critical incident response including live game service issues - and implementing proactive and predictive monitors and action plans to prevent recurrence.
• Reduced major incident rate from multiple per week to a system with 99.9% uptime by maturing process, implementing alerting and making architectural improvements.
• Established agile delivery practices that enabled shipping multiple major features in five months including score predictions, match ratings and Premier League updates.
• Managed strategic partnerships to accelerate development velocity and manage budgets.
• Designed agentic AI system to analyse fan sentiment and enable natural football conversation, processing 10k applicant interactions during early access.