Theo Windebank
London, UK · theowindebank.co.uk · github/twindebank · linkedin/theowindebank
Experience
Gradient Labs
Senior Backend Engineer
Jul 2024 – Present · London, UK
- Most tenured engineer and one of the most prolific, with contributions spanning backend, infrastructure, frontend, and tooling.
- Built and led delivery of the platform-wide GitHub integration behind Collaborate - the new feature that lets teams improve their AI agent like code, with the agent’s procedures, tools, and tests versioned in a git repository and every behaviour change shipped as a reviewed pull request.
- Built the shared skills system that most of the company now operates on - a common foundation for defining and reusing agent capabilities across teams.
- Built MCP infrastructure end-to-end: connectors allowing companies to expose their own tools to the agent via MCP, and servers exposing Gradient’s APIs to customers - including OAuth flows, connection state management, and frontend management UI.
- Built the core of how the agent accesses and acts on customer data:
- The resources system - how customers deterministically provide data to the agent.
- The tools system - how the agent fetches data and interacts with customer systems on demand.
- Foundations for human-in-the-loop flows, including general asynchronous tool execution.
- Significant contributor to outbound conversations (that’s me in the video!); designed and built the batch system enabling the agent to initiate and manage large volumes of customer conversations at scale.
- Built real-time streaming infrastructure for the conversation timeline, giving full visibility into agent reasoning, tool calls, and knowledge retrieval as they happen.
- Major contributor to third-party support platform integrations: Freshdesk, Freshchat, Zendesk, and Intercom.
- Thrives on ambiguity - prefers a problem statement over a spec, and takes ownership of the full solution: shaping the design, pulling in the right people (design, frontend, data, other engineers), and driving it through to delivery.
- Extensive Temporal experience - used throughout the platform for durable execution: async tool calls, resource refresh pipelines, outbound batch orchestration, conversation lifecycle management, and more.
- Owned infrastructure across the board: Terraform, Grafana/Prometheus monitoring, alerting, and CI/CD - while regularly shipping product changes as a fully cross-stack engineer.
- Early Claude Code adopter; built and advocated for worktree-based tooling that let the team parallelise AI-assisted development and meaningfully increase velocity.
Monzo Bank
Senior Backend Engineer
May 2024 – Jul 2024 · London, UK
Backend Engineer
Jun 2022 – May 2024 · London, UK
- Founding backend engineer on the squad that rebuilt Monzo’s Home screen - one of the most central surfaces in the app, serving both customers and internal teams building on top of it.
- Built the ‘Overview’ framework with backend and mobile engineers: a server-driven, extensible platform that let other squads across Monzo build, contribute to, and customise Home - internal tooling that effectively turned the squad into a platform team.
- Became deeply fluent in Go, taking on complex backend work across a high-traffic, cross-team surface.
Senior Data Engineer, Analytics
Aug 2020 – Jun 2022 · London, UK
- Key contributor to Monzo’s data stack - a centralised BigQuery/dbt/Airflow platform serving ~150 data contributors across the company.
- Designed and built an extension framework for dbt that replaced a hard-to-maintain internal fork, enabling faster upgrades and modular customisation across ~6,900 models.
- Led data governance work including access control patterns and tooling for managing sensitive data at scale.
Data Engineer, Analytics
Apr 2019 – Aug 2020 · London, UK
- Rolled out dbt across the company; designed supporting infrastructure and onboarding docs used by over 100 engineers.
- Designed and led development of a distributed access control system written in Go for sensitive user data.
BBC
Interim Lead Data Engineer
Dec 2018 – Mar 2019 · London, UK
- Assumed lead engineer role during a 4-month rotation while the team restructured from one team of 15 into two smaller squads, introduced OKRs, and pivoted to new objectives.
- Led recruitment of a principal engineer: wrote interview questions, evaluated candidates, and assessed team fit.
Data Engineer
Nov 2017 – Mar 2019 · London, UK
- Part of BBC Datalab from its early formation - helped build BBC+, the first BBC app to serve fully automated ML recommendations, built from scratch on a Kubernetes/GCP microservice architecture.
- Worked on a subsequent internal ML platform, including deploying JupyterHub with audited access to user and content data, and building tooling to version data and graph pipeline dependencies for full reproducibility.
- Spoke at PyData London 2018.
Cue Sense Ltd.
Software Engineer
Jun 2017 – Nov 2017 · London, UK
- Built software to help visually impaired people interpret non-verbal cues using computer vision and machine learning.
Oxford Machine Learning Research Group
Software Developer Intern
Jul 2016 – Sep 2016 · Oxford, UK
- Developed ML techniques to detect mosquito presence, species, and gender from audio recordings; built upon in my fourth year project, graded 83.
- Built a fully-featured Python package as a test-bed for detection algorithms, aimed at open source release.
- Ranked in the top 5% of students who have worked with the Oxford-Man Institute.
Education
University of Oxford - MEng Engineering Science
Sep 2013 – Jun 2017 · St. Catherine’s College · 2.i (68)
Interests
Running
Hackney Half Sep ‘21 · Royal Parks Half Oct ‘24 · Kingston Half Oct ‘24 · TTP Cambridge Half Mar ‘25 · Brighton Marathon Apr ‘25 · Oxford Half Oct ‘25 · TCS Amsterdam Marathon Oct ‘25 · EDP Lisbon Half Mar ‘26 · Camino Lea Valley 50km Ultra Mar ‘26
Tour Aotearoa
Cycled the length of New Zealand - a 3,000km bikepacking route from Cape Reinga to Bluff - self-supported and camping throughout, completed in 5 weeks, Jan–Feb 2024.
Smart home
Local Home Assistant deployment; interested in home automation and keeping things off the cloud.
Skills
Go · Python · MCP · Claude Code · Temporal · Distributed Systems · Kubernetes · Terraform · GCP · Docker · Grafana · Prometheus · Kafka · SQL · dbt · Airflow · BigQuery · ElasticSearch · TypeScript / React / Next.js (Claude Code assisted) · Machine Learning · Encore · Public Speaking