Fractional Chief Architect / Development Lead · South East, UK

Your platform was built for the company you used to be.

I rebuild cloud platforms, and the teams that run them, two or three days a week. Thirty years of doing exactly this: AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, .NET services, the whole estate in Terraform. You get the Chief Architect you cannot yet justify hiring.

Talk to me about your platform See what I have shipped

Previously: my own companies, Microsoft, IBM, AWS and Schroders

Which of these is you?

Three situations I get called into.

If one of these reads like your Monday morning, we should talk. If none of them do, I am probably not the right person, and I will say so.

You are scaling and the platform is the bottleneck

Releases that used to take a day now take a fortnight. Every new feature touches the same service. The team is growing but shipping slower, and you cannot tell whether that is architecture, process or people.

I take the monolith apart in the order that unblocks delivery first, and leave the team able to keep doing it.

Your estate is a decade old and nobody wants to touch it

It runs, mostly. It is on an old .NET version, half on-prem or on a first-generation cloud setup, and the two people who understand it are the two people you cannot afford to lose.

I have run this migration end to end before, including the version upgrades and the data. No big bang, no eighteen-month freeze.

You are regulated, and the architecture has to prove it

Separation of duties, access boundaries, identity federation and an audit trail that stands up. The design has to satisfy an auditor as well as an engineer, and retrofitting that later is brutal.

I architected the platform that onboarded a Lloyds and Schroders joint venture, adding over £10bn in managed assets.

30 yrs

Hands-on, and still in the codebase and the pipeline today.

15 → 100

Engineers grown into 8 teams, through an acquisition by Schroders.

£10bn+

Client assets onboarded onto a platform I architected.

8 of 8

Global events delivered on time, in a single year, across 4 time zones.

Proof

Three platforms, and what they were worth.

Graffic Jam

A Fortune 500 client, £6.5bn annual revenue

Director, Chief Architect & Lead Engineer
2021 to 2026

The problem

Their flagship global recognition programme was rebuilt, in effect, for every event. Eight events a year across four time zones, thousands of guests, and absolutely no room to be late.

What I did

I designed and built an event-driven platform where standing up a new event is configuration, not fresh code. .NET services, a React and Next.js front end, a React Native app for on-site staff, running on a multi-account AWS estate held entirely in Terraform.

What it was worth

8 of 8 events delivered on time in a single year, for 6,000+ attendees across Hawaii, the US West Coast, Europe and Australia
25,000 personal and 1,000 group bookings handled; 300,000+ photos and videos pushed live to on-site signage
A 20-year media archive of 1.5m+ items, available around the clock

.NET · React & Next.js · React Native · AWS · Terraform · Auth0

Benchmark Capital

Acquired by Schroders

Chief Architect
2015 to 2021

The problem

A privately owned financial-planning platform running on a monolith, heading into acquisition by Schroders and a joint venture with Lloyds Bank that would transform the scale of assets it had to administer.

What I did

I took the systems from a monolith to event-based services, designed and ran the migration off RackSpace onto Azure, provisioned the CI/CD pipeline, and grew the engineering group from around 15 people to 100 across 8 scaled-agile teams.

What it was worth

The architecture carried the Lloyds Bank and Schroders joint venture onto the platform, adding over £10bn in managed assets
Engineering grew from about 15 to 100 without the delivery pace collapsing
Schroders bought the remaining minority stake outright in 2021

.NET · Azure · Azure Service Bus · SQL Server · CI/CD · SAFe

ETZ Technologies

Co-founded, no outside investment

CTO & Co-founder
2008 to 2015

The problem

Recruitment agencies were running their back office on paper timesheets and spreadsheets. We started with two people, a clear view of the problem, and no seed capital.

What I did

I owned the architecture and built the platform and its pipeline, moving it onto Azure and adopting SOA, NServiceBus and a microservices design as the load and the team grew.

What it was worth

£2m annual turnover and 400+ clients across 20 countries
Grown from 2 people to 30 staff, funded entirely out of revenue
I line-managed 14 developers, an architect, 6 testers and the support function

.NET · Azure · NServiceBus · SOA · SQL Server

The full thirty years

Capability

What I bring on day one.

Multi-cloud infrastructure

AWS in depth, Azure from a full migration and five years running it, Google Cloud kept current. Multi-account estates with real separation of duties, networking that survives an audit, and the cost conversation had honestly before the bill arrives.

AWSAzureGCPECS FargateAurora / PostgreSQLS3CloudFrontKubernetes

.NET services & APIs

Production C# since the first release of .NET. Event-driven services, REST and messaging APIs, domain-driven design where it earns its keep, plus the judgement to leave a monolith alone when splitting it would only buy you latency and another standup.

C#.NETASP.NET CoreBlazorSQL ServerPostgreSQLNoSQLNServiceBusMassTransitKafkaEF CoreDapper

Infrastructure as code & delivery

Terraform across the whole estate, not just the easy half. CI/CD your engineers trust enough to deploy on a Friday afternoon, and the pipeline work that turns a two-week release into a twenty-minute one.

TerraformBicepCodePipelineGitHub ActionsDockerKubernetes

Machine learning & MLOps

Newest line

The newest thing on this list, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise. What I bring today is the MLOps half: the platform around the models, which is mostly platform engineering wearing a different hat, plus the honesty to say when your problem is not a machine learning problem.

BigQuery MLVertex AIMLOpsEmbeddingsVector searchRAGMCPAI-assisted engineering

In their words

What it is like to work with me.

When our Fortune 500 client requested we take on and develop their entire digital system for their flagship global events programme Andrew designed and delivered the whole system end to end: the .NET services, the front end, the admin tooling, the onsite app — and ran it as a proper AWS cloud estate with Terraform and CI/CD behind it. It was a genuinely ambitious build, and it worked. Eight events across four continents in a single year, tens of thousands of bookings, over six thousand attendees, and it delivered exactly what the client asked for, every single time.
What sets Andrew apart isn't just the depth of his engineering — 30 years of it, and still very much hands-on — it's his temperament. He's the person the team stays calm around when something's on fire, and the one who'll quietly dig into the hardest problem himself rather than let it stall. He thinks commercially, too: he treated our budget as his own and built for the business we actually were, not the one on a conference slide.
If you're a smaller company after a hands-on technical lead or architect who can set the direction, raise the engineering bar and still get stuck into the code, I'd recommend Andrew without hesitation. I'd work with him again in a heartbeat.

Adrian MiskellyCreative Director, Graffic JamWorked alongside Andrew on the Fortune 500 events platform

Andrew is an incredible talent with an encyclopedic knowledge of technology. He was a great mentor to the architects and developers at Benchmark Capital leading material change in the quality of the software produced and the processes the business adopted. He was able to explain complicated concepts and simplified the architecture at Benchmark to increase delivery efficiency.
He led the technology solution to win the largest client contract, a joint venture with Lloyds to create Schroders Personal Wealth which was a huge success for Benchmark, Lloyds and Schroders.

Alex BondSoftware Architect and EngineerReported to Andrew at Benchmark Capital

Having worked with Andrew for 5 years at Benchmark, he's an incredibly dedicated and knowledgeable architect and developer, as well as being a brilliant public speaker and presenter.

Andy SiantonasHead of Product, Benchmark CapitalManaged Andrew directly for five years

No charge, no pitch

Send me your architecture. I will tell you what I would change.

Thirty minutes, a diagram or a repo, and an honest read on the two or three things I would fix first. If that turns into work, good. If it does not, you still leave with the list.

Book the call

Working together

Three ways in.

Fractional Chief Architect

Two to three days a weekThree months minimum

Technical direction and architecture, with my hands still on the estate and the pipeline. I lift the team’s skills while I am there, so the capability stays after I leave.

Senior engineering, delivered

Two to five days a weekLonger contracts

Where what you need is production C#, .NET and cloud engineering shipped, rather than another person in the leadership meeting.

A defined piece of work

One to four weeksFixed scope, fixed price

An architecture review, a migration plan, a Terraform estate brought under control, or a week alongside your team to unstick something specific.

Flexible and part-time, able to start at short notice. On-site across Brighton, Hove, Worthing, Lewes, Haywards Heath, Crawley, Gatwick and Horsham, into Surrey and London, or fully remote across the UK. Rates discussed on the call, once I know what you actually need.

Andrew Cheeseman
Hove, East Sussex

Who you would be working with

I never stopped building.

Thirty years: IBM, then Microsoft as Technical Architect for the EMEA events team, a SaaS company I co-founded and ran as CTO, a financial platform I architected through an acquisition, eight months at AWS advising founders on what good looks like, and five years designing and running a production cloud platform for a Fortune 500 client.

The through-line is that I kept my hands on the work. I can wear three hats, often at once: writing the C#, owning the cloud estate and the pipeline, and setting the architecture while bringing the team along with me. My honest belief is that a good team delivers far more than any individual, so most of the value I add is in the people already in your building.

I work with a small number of clients part-time. That means you get the senior person you actually spoke to, not a pitch followed by someone three years out of university.

Tell me where you are stuck.

A short conversation costs nothing and usually gets further than a written brief. If I am not the right person, I will say so and point you at someone who is.

andrewc@cheesesharp.com

Phone

+44 7495 627633

Elsewhere

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