Andi Smith

LifeWorks is a total well-being digital platform providing employee assistance, physical and mental well-being, perks and social features to employees at companies such as Amazon UK, Co-Op, RBC, Starbucks and TD Bank.

I was brought in to lead the UK and Europe engineering teams, taking the product from its startup foundations to an enterprise-ready, globally scalable solution.

• Scaled engineering from 40 to 110 across six feature teams covering iOS, Android, web and platform, managing nine engineering leads.
• Re-architected a PHP monolith into around 300 event-based Python and Node.js microservices running on AWS Lambda and Docker, taking release cadence from quarterly to continuous and increasing velocity 300%.
• Architected a HIPAA-compliant, data-resident solution across multiple AWS regions, enabling launches in the US, Canada, Australia and Asia and unlocking $5M ARR.
• Established offshore engineering capability, building distributed teams that increased delivery throughput 40%.
• Supported technical due diligence for both acquisitions: Morneau Shepell ($426M CAD, 2019) and TELUS Health ($2.3B CAD, 2022).
• Established the engineering culture, hiring bar and delivery processes that made the team acquisition-ready.

The company went through significant change while I was technical leader. After the Morneau Shepell acquisition I worked with my team to integrate our application into other businesses and services, and led a period of technology transformation to align the technical teams. Morneau Shepell later changed its name to LifeWorks, which felt like acknowledgement for all the hard work our team had put into building the brand.