Michael Thomas

OPUMO is a men's fashion and design publication, and the parent company where I built WordSeed from inception in 2021. I run both.

• Delivered the full product with the founders and the sales and creative teams: CPC billing and accounting, publisher and advertiser dashboards, campaign management.
• Split the highest-traffic services out of the Laravel monolith onto Cloudflare Workers, giving them independent scaling and uptime from the main application.
• Created the deployment pipeline on Bitbucket Pipelines: automated tests and zero-downtime releases, so deploys go out mid-morning without dropping traffic.
• Designed and built the click-fraud detection that filters between a third and a half of incoming traffic as invalid to protect advertiser spend across millions of requests per year.
• Built the billing and collection side: CPC metering into advertiser invoicing, with payment taken through Stripe, GoCardless, and PayPal.
• Built the payout side on the Wise banking API, sending money internationally across currencies and reconciling it against platform balances.
• Kept the revenue-critical click-tracking up with a single 30-minute outage in four years, and the management dashboard at 99.99% uptime, as the only engineer on call.
• Set the technical roadmap, hold the decisions on engineering, infrastructure, and vendors, and own the security, backup, and disaster-recovery posture across all properties.
• Designed and run the hosting end to end: a load-balanced VPS pair alongside Cloudflare's edge, which cut hosting costs by roughly half while improving reliability.
• Replatformed OPUMO from Magento to a bespoke content and CPC model, growing revenue by 70% in the first year.
• Built and maintain the third-party integrations across the platform: Google Merchant feeds for product and stock data, the Meta advertiser and marketplace APIs, Google Analytics, and others.
• Designed and wrote AI-driven tools that help clients manage campaigns and find AEO/GEO opportunities, integrating the OpenAI, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini APIs.

Developer on the Clik CMS, a self-serve website builder running under the Clikpic, ClikBeats, and Clikcraft brands, and responsible for the servers behind it, alongside third-line customer support and documentation.

• Migrated the platform from Windows / IIS / Adobe ColdFusion to Ubuntu / Nginx / Lucee, covering provisioning, configuration, and deployment to production.
• Drove the team's adoption of Git version control and automated CI/CD, making the case for both and delivering them despite initial resistance.
• Automated HTTPS across more than 15,000 client sites with Certbot and scripts I wrote.
• Built new functionality for customers' sites, led the move to responsive design and AJAX-based editing, and handled third-line support.

Sole IT provision for a 5-person organisation. Built and launched a Magento e-commerce store from scratch, handling hosting, payment integration and staff training. Kept the organisation's IT running day to day, from hardware and software troubleshooting to end-user support.