Michael Thomas

Sole technical owner. OPUMO is a men's fashion and design publication, and the parent company where I built WordSeed from inception in 2021, working directly with the founders and the sales and creative teams.

• Delivered the full product: publisher and advertiser dashboards, campaign management, and the reporting behind both.
• Built the billing and accounting core: click events accrued into daily totals, posted to an append-only account transaction ledger, and billed against the derived balance.
• Designed that ledger to reconcile under audit. Balances are recalculated from the ledger rather than stored, corrections are posted as new entries, and accruals freeze after a five working day amendment window with the issued invoice as the fixed record.
• Built the money movement on both sides: CPC metering into advertiser invoicing with payment taken through Stripe, GoCardless and PayPal, and international multi-currency payouts on the Wise banking API, reconciled against platform balances.
• 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.
• Split the highest-traffic services out of the Laravel monolith onto Cloudflare Workers, giving them independent scaling and uptime from the main application.
• Took the codebase from no automated tests to 80% coverage enforced in CI on all new code, unit and feature, under PHPUnit, and built the deployment pipeline on Bitbucket Pipelines with zero-downtime releases.
• Kept the revenue-critical click tracking up with a single 30-minute outage in four years, and the management dashboard at 99.99% uptime over the past year, as the only engineer on call.
• Set the technical roadmap and hold the decisions on engineering, infrastructure and vendors, including redesigning the hosting onto a load-balanced VPS pair alongside Cloudflare's edge, which halved costs whilst 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, and responsible for the servers behind it.

• 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.