Liam Laverty

I'm co-owner of Etive Mor. We're two developers providing hands-on software engineering; technical management; and R&D services, mostly to startups. We get a lot of word-of-mouth references, and our biggest source of business is returning customers.

Some key projects & contracts I've worked on are listed below.

Treeconomy was working on delivering a several hundred thousand pound UK Space Agency (UKSA) grant project when I joined as a contracting lead engineer for their customer facing applications. I worked on technical management of the project's client-facing components (API layer and Next.js applications). Alongside the UKSA grant project, I led the modernisation of Treeconomy's front-end products; their engineering AI adoption; & developer experience improvements.

• Managed a team of 3 senior engineers to successfully deliver all milestones on the customer-facing portion of their UKSA grant project.
• Adopted AI-assisted engineering and modern CI principles to increase release cadence from 1 per month, to several per week.
• Modernised Treeconomy's Next.js frontend application, iteratively migrating from JavaScript to TypeScript.
• Improved load times for the frontend application from 10-15s down to 200-300ms.
• Consolidated the company's disparate multi-language API implementations into a stack of FastAPI endpoints.
• Updated the company's frontend Next.js application to follow Reactive principles.
• Introduced testing practices in the company's front-end.
• Technical management of the hiring process for three engineers, including interviewing candidates, and building take home tests.

In 2024/25, Etive Mor applied for a grant from Scottish Enterprise to implement a novel technique to calculate the carbon efficiency of international shipping for the international trade finance sector. We hit our technical goals, but didn't find a suitable product-market-fit, so these apps didn't ever make it into production.

• Wrote a successful grant application document, managed the administrative relationship with Scottish Enterprise, and arranged all accounting & reporting requirements.
• Built a dynamic classification framework to map physical goods identifiers to sustainability targets for shipping companies.
• Implemented a FastAPI/PostgreSQL backend to surface the classification framework to end users.
• Implemented a demo front-end for end-users to review the classification framework results.
• Implemented a python & C# application (both open sourced) to calculate the carbon intensity of a shipping journey according to rules outlined by the International Maritime Organisation.
• Took part in the venture accelerators Carbon13, Barclays Eagle Labs, & Converge.

Kestrix was working on identifying sources of heat-loss in residential buildings. The company uses drone photography & thermal imaging with photogrammetry to construct digital twins of buildings, and then uses machine learning techniques to spot heat-loss in those twins. During my contract I conducted R&D and productionisation work to improve the heat-loss estimations.

• Constructed Blender digital twins of buildings from drone photography.
• Improved accuracy of thermal imagery projections onto the digital twins.
• Implemented physics calculations to produce accurate heat loss values for each point on the building, controlling for photographic and environmental factors.
• Productionised a Material Segmentation model (DMS), converting research code into a deployable pixel-by-pixel material classification pipeline before it was deployed to GCP's VertexAI.

Before my joining, capacity constraints meant that the company's support desk was consistently pushing up against its SLA agreements with clients. I successfully reduced this backlog so that all tickets were being completed within the client's SLA. After resolving the support desk issues, I undertook regular engineering project work, including websites for large corporate clients.

• Cleared 40+ stale tickets from the support desk backlog in the first three weeks, bringing all tickets in line with the company's SLA agreements.
• Ran the support desk 2/5 days per week, ensuring bugs were either squashed immediately, or a remediation plan was in place to meet the client SLA agreement.
• Wrote several healthcheck reports for the company's clients, describing modernisation opportunities for the clients' websites & backend applications.
• .NET and Umbraco application development on several large projects, especially when the projects were approaching their delivery deadline.

As lead developer at TradeSun/CoriolisESG, my role included technical oversight of a multi-disciplined team. The team included data scientists, software engineers, and subject matter experts, focusing on R&D in the international development & sustainability space for the finance sector. At this role I was the principal technical lead, which included hands-on software development, architecture, and infrastructure. Alongside my engineering responsibilities, I was responsible for the company's agile processes, including running scrum meetings, task writing, task estimation, sprint organising, and Jira management.

• Architected and implemented a data pipeline, using Azure Service Bus as a queue system for assessing an arbitrary company's financial & environmental performance.
• Productionised a semantic analysis model for adverse corporate news.
• Implemented a pipeline to assess company directors according to Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti Money Laundering (AML) regulations.
• Built a secure & high-throughput frontend API in C#, which was used by Tier-1 UK & international banks.
• Managed the pull request and QA process for new features.

As Technical Lead at Intelligent Mobile (2018-2021), I led a team of 6 developers, and worked hands-on in C#, TypeScript, and .NET. The team won several awards for our work in the leisure, housing, and student accommodation sectors. Awards included UK App Awards App of the year 2019-20, The Herald Digital Agency of the Year 2019-20, The Herald App of The Year 2020, and Northern Dev Awards Agency of the year 2020.

Prior to Technical Lead, I was Senior Analyst Programmer (2014-2018), where I worked on web & ecommerce applications for the student accommodation industry.

My first engineering role was at First4Websites, producing small brochure websites in WordPress for local businesses.

Between 2020-2025, I studied part-time for my undergrad degree through the Open University's elective course (Open Degree). My modules focused on applied mathematics, econometrics & economic modelling.

For my dissertation, I built an economy simulator in Python, and trained machine learning models to set prices of goods. The work focused on the behaviour of the artificially intelligent agents in this setting, and found that they cooperate to inflate prices above the economically expected Nash equilibrium price point.A copy of the dissertation can be found here.

Modules:

• Computational and applied mathematics
• Running The Economy
• Doing economics: People, Markets, and Policy
• Economics for a changing world

I also hold a HND from Northumbria Uni. The course focused on programming and mathematics for computer games in C & C++. Modules included building a toy videogame for the GameCube.