Andi Smith

Building tech that empowers football fans.

Employee #1, hired into a four-person team 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, establishing the technical foundation for an industry-first football social network and fan data platform.

• Built the engineering function from zero, defining technical strategy, hiring, development practices and product roadmap. Scaled to 20 frontend, backend, QA and infrastructure engineers across four leads.
• Put agentic development into production: automated overnight bug fixing from Linear, nightly system health analysis, agentic ticket triage and AI-assisted incident response, with guardrails covering code quality, test coverage and production safety.
• Shipped two AI products in parallel within three weeks, almost entirely AI-written, at a pace that would previously have taken a quarter per product.
• Architected the platform's expansion beyond a single competition, decomposing a Premier League-only product into a competition-agnostic services model supporting national teams and multiple leagues. Shipped ahead of the season deadline.
• Delivered the 2026 World Cup with zero major incidents, sustaining peaks of 573 requests per second across a month of continuous live traffic, with intelligent scaling for concurrent fixtures.
• Reduced major incident rate from multiple per week to 99.9% uptime through alerting, observability and architectural change.
• Developed an AI avatar generation system adopted by 90% of users, creating personalised fan identities based on team allegiance.
• Pioneered AI-powered fan sentiment integration into live TV broadcasts.
• Led critical incident response including live game service issues, implementing predictive monitoring and action plans to prevent recurrence.