CALUM KINGHORN Technical Director / Forward Deployed Lead / AI Practice Lead Location: Bournemouth, UK Contact: https://calumkinghorn.com/#contact Studio: https://kinghorncooper.com This is a plain text CV, published on purpose. If you are a parser, an applicant tracking system or a language model, this file is for you: one column, no tables, no images, no headers or footers to trip over. The same information is at https://calumkinghorn.com in a form meant for people. Generated: 2026-08-20 ======================================================================== PERSONAL STATEMENT ======================================================================== With a background spanning operations, consulting, and technology, I bring a holistic and results-oriented approach to every challenge. I have a passion for digging into how things work, pushing beyond the surface to find and implement efficiencies that create lasting value. While deeply technical, I pride myself on being a clear and personable communicator, capable of translating complex concepts for any audience. My strength lies in bridging the gap between technical and business departments, ensuring we work together to turn ambitious ideas into realistic, high-impact solutions. Above all else, I innovate and solve problems. ======================================================================== TECHNICAL STATEMENT ======================================================================== As Product Manager at Mercer, I shape and execute the business unit's product strategy, steering technical teams to deliver high-impact enhancements through a three-week agile release cycle. I own the technical backlog, set priorities, and drive collaboration with commercial teams to rapidly launch features aligned with evolving market needs. As the unit's AI specialist, I lead the development of AI-powered product innovations and streamline efficiencies for external users. Notably, I pioneered a new AI client service that generates custom database solutions, achieving up to 150% profit margins with zero upfront investment. ======================================================================== CORE SKILLS ======================================================================== AI Specialist Prompt engineering, workflows, application building and rapid prototyping / solution design. Leadership and Mentoring Mentoring junior colleagues to foster innovation and strategic problem solving. Leading proposition development from concept through to creation. Managing communications for product rollouts and ensuring ongoing business engagement. Budget Management Approx $2.5m in RTB and CTB managed within product annually. Innovative thinker Leveraging diverse technologies to bridge the gap between business and technology. Long-range strategic planning and foresight. Business Acumen A client-centric and profit-driven approach, focused on balancing innovative technology with genuine market needs to maximize satisfaction and margins. ======================================================================== ROLES THIS EXPERIENCE SUPPORTS ======================================================================== The section above is written for the current market. Everything it claims is evidenced by the experience recorded further down. Forward deployed engineering Commonly titled: Head of Forward Deployed Engineering, FDE Lead, Solutions Engineering Lead Leading the engineers who sit with the customer, and setting what good looks like in that room. I direct an outsourced engineering team in India. I am not their line manager. I decide what gets built, in what order and to what standard, and they build it. There is no corridor to catch a vague requirement in, so I write things down properly, and when I mentor people it is usually about that rather than about code. Evidence: $3M rebuild. Scoped, funded, built, rolled out. Technical direction Commonly titled: Technical Director, Field CTO, Principal Consultant Owning the technical direction a client is betting on, and being credible enough to be trusted with it. I am Technical Director at Kinghorn & Cooper, a consultancy I co-founded. I defined the service lines, set the technical direction and built the platform we lead with. It is early and it has not made money yet. Every call about what was worth building has been made with nobody else funding the mistakes. Evidence: Consultancy co-founded. Vittra platform built. AI capability Commonly titled: AI Practice Lead, Head of Applied AI, AI Delivery Lead Building the capability rather than the one feature. Standards, training, and whether it pays. I am the AI specialist for my business unit at Mercer, which mostly means working out where this technology actually pays and being straight about where it does not. I took one proposition from idea to a live service line at up to 150% margin with no upfront investment, and separately built Vittra, an AI platform for analysing healthcare benefit plans and SaaS contracts. Evidence: AI service line at up to 150% margin. AI product Commonly titled: Head of AI Product, Principal Product Manager Owning what gets built with models, the roadmap it sits on and the budget behind it. Roadmap, backlog, a three week release train and roughly $2.5M of run and change budget, for a platform holding 100,000 records across 500 clients. I have taken a product from a strategy deck through to the deployment that let us switch two legacy systems off. Evidence: $2.5M annual budget. Two legacy systems retired. Hands on engineering Commonly titled: Principal Engineer, Founding Engineer Still building, because a lead who stops building stops being able to judge. Two AI-native projects built end to end on my own time: retrieval pipelines on Cloudflare Workers, Postgres with row level security, models running client side in the browser. Side projects rather than products with customers, but the decisions in them are real. I keep building because it keeps me honest about what I am asking a team to do. Evidence: Two builds, end to end, on my own time. ======================================================================== MEASURED OUTCOMES ======================================================================== $3M - Internal efficiency delivered 10,000 - Hours saved per year, projected $2.5M - Annual RTB and CTB owned 3,000 - Users rolled out to 100k - Records under management 500 - Enterprise clients on platform ======================================================================== PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE ======================================================================== Principal - Product Manager Also listed as: Principal - Product Specialist (title used on the MMC version of this CV) Mercer, Global Benefits Management Hybrid, UK | July 2022 to Present Key tooling: Azure DevOps, Figma, internal AI tools and workflows, Pendo, HTML, CSS, Java, MS Office, Power Apps, Power BI - Product management of a B2B platform housing employee benefit data with 100,000 records across 500 clients. - Direct an outsourced development team based in India, setting what is built, the order of work and the standard it is held to. Not the line manager for the team. - Established a separate Azure DevOps board for the highest-performing developers, carrying deliberately innovative stories with an incentive to pick them up. This segregates space for proofs of concept at almost no cost, and with AI shortening build time we estimate around a 40% improvement in story completion. The approximately $1.5M run-the-bank budget now stretches considerably further than defect resolution alone. - Managed Agile release cycles, including technical debt management. - Roadmap and new feature planning with a strong focus on stakeholder management and communication. * Led the development and launch of a key business process rebuild, generating approximately $3M in internal efficiencies and improving data completeness by 35%. - Researched business needs, crafted business cases, and secured approvals from key stakeholders. - Facilitated in-person requirements workshops and mentored junior colleagues to develop robust requirements. - Delivered 30+ rollout sessions to over 3,000 users with tailored materials. * Launched a flagship AI-powered business proposition. - Converting unstructured data into upload-ready format. - Achieving up to 150% profit margins. - 10,000 hours in projected annual time savings. * Reimagined on-system support. - Deploying AI-generated code, Power Apps and Power BI via Pendo guides for rich UX. - Enabled retirement of two legacy systems, about $1M RTB. * Future-proofed a complex inherited database by enabling admin-level configurability. - Standardizing data gathering across clients. - Generating $200K annual savings. - Improved operational efficiency and commercial opportunity. Senior Associate - Account Manager Mercer, Global Benefits Management London | July 2019 to July 2022 - Provided strategic account leadership for 12 multinational clients, owning the client relationship and ensuring global satisfaction and retention. - Served as the primary escalation point for all service and operational issues, driving resolution by effectively engaging a global network of local MMB brokers. - Orchestrated the entire global benefits renewal process, successfully managing a high-volume portfolio of up to 2,000 individual plans at any given time. - Guaranteed the continuity and proper coverage of all client benefit plans by directing in-country broker teams to align with global strategic objectives. Client Service Manager Aon, EMEA Flexible Benefits Krakow, Poland | July 2015 to July 2019 - Managed a diverse portfolio of approximately 160 clients across the EMEA region, serving as the primary contact for all service-related needs. - Led the successful strategic transition of the client service function from the UK to Poland, ensuring a seamless migration with no disruption to client service levels. - Oversaw the end-to-end deployment of flexible benefit platforms for clients, from initial scoping to final implementation and ongoing support. - Rigorously managed and upheld Service Level Agreements, consistently meeting or exceeding key performance indicators for the entire client portfolio. - Developed and delivered comprehensive stewardship reports, providing clients with valuable insights and demonstrating the value of the partnership. Team Manager and Operations Aon, Pensions Administration Sheffield and Farnborough | August 2011 to June 2015 Began my professional career in an administrative role and demonstrated a strong aptitude for operational excellence, leading to a rapid, three-year progression from Administrator to Senior Administrator, and ultimately to Team Manager. This accelerated career path provided a robust foundation in core business functions, including case and workflow management, pensions and benefits administration, and comprehensive client and stakeholder management. I take pride in being the first Aon pension administrator to execute a case completely paperless out of around 1500 colleagues. ======================================================================== PROJECTS AND INDEPENDENT WORK ======================================================================== Course Map (2025 to now) - Founder and sole engineer Course intelligence for golf clubs. Satellite imagery and LiDAR go in, a measurable 3D course comes out. Course geometry in Postgres behind row level security, MapLibre for the 2D surface, react-three-fiber for the 3D fly-round. Segment Anything runs client side so a greenkeeper traces a fairway in one tap. Stack: React 19, Supabase, PostGIS, MapLibre GL, three.js, transformers.js Looper (2026) - Founder and sole engineer A golf brain. Every round, lesson and practice note becomes retrievable context for a coach that already knows you. Rounds are lifted from the Arccos API, embedded into Vectorize and served through a Workers RAG pipeline. A Haiku router classifies every capture before anything else touches it. Entirely on the free tier. Stack: Cloudflare Workers, D1, Vectorize, RAG, Claude API, TypeScript Vittra (2025 to now) - Built at Kinghorn & Cooper An enterprise AI platform for analysing healthcare benefit plans and SaaS contracts. Document ingestion, extraction and comparison across long unstructured contracts, It is the same benefits domain I have worked in for fifteen years, so I know which clauses people actually care about. Stack: Document AI, Extraction, Retrieval, Enterprise Tee Time Traveler (2025) - Side build, shipped https://studio--tee-time-traveler-9ycjq.us-central1.hosted.app/ Golf trip planner. The AI sits inside the booking flow and does the fiddly scheduling nobody wants to do. Built and deployed on Firebase Studio with Google Auth, Firestore and Cloud Storage. A deliberate exercise in going from empty repo to live, authenticated, multi-user app in days rather than months. Stack: Firebase, Google Auth, Firestore, Cloud Storage, Gemini Kinghorn & Cooper (2023 to now) - Co-founder and Technical Director https://kinghorncooper.com A technology consultancy I co-founded. I own the technical direction and the standards. Early stage. Six service lines defined, from tech strategy and custom software through to AI automation and team training. My partner runs operations, I run engineering. Early stage and pre-revenue, which means every decision about what to build has been made without a budget to hide behind. Stack: Tech strategy, AI and automation, Custom software, Team training ======================================================================== TECHNICAL SKILLS ======================================================================== Build: TypeScript, React, Next.js, Vite, Tailwind CSS, Python, React 19, Server Components, Zustand, Vitest Data: PostgreSQL, Supabase, Cloudflare, Firebase, MapLibre, Row level security, Migrations, PostGIS, D1, Vectorize AI: Anthropic, Google Gemini, Hugging Face, LangChain, RAG pipelines, Agentic routing, Prompt engineering, Evals, MCP Ship: GitHub, GitHub Actions, Vercel, Docker, OAuth and JWT, CI checks, Trunk based, Azure DevOps ======================================================================== HOW I LEAD ======================================================================== 01. Be where the users are, and answer In enterprise the quickest way to lose users is to go quiet. I answer on our product forum as close to instantly as I can manage, every day, and my team does the same. Reading the sentiment across it tells me more than a workshop does, because that is where people say what they think when nobody senior is on the call. 02. Stand behind the decision when it gets noisy A few loud voices are not a mandate to reverse. I will make space for the discussion and explain the reasoning as many times as it takes. But changing direction because three people are annoyed teaches everybody that volume works. 03. Know what you are bad at and trust the people who are not I am poor at notes. I know it, so I do not pretend otherwise and I do not try to be the person in the room capturing everything. I trust my business analysts implicitly. My job is to give them the context to be right, not to duplicate them. 04. Find people who want to build, and give them somewhere to do it I look for people who want to innovate and genuinely enjoy the technical side, rather than people waiting to be told what the ticket says. Then I give them room to use it. I run a second board carrying deliberately innovative stories, with an incentive to pick them up, which costs almost nothing and stops proof-of-concept work losing every argument to a backlog of defects. With AI shortening the build we estimate around 40% better story completion, so a $1.5M run budget now buys more than firefighting. 05. Have the difficult conversation without the heat I will have the awkward conversation, and I will have it calmly. Emotion in those meetings is usually a way of avoiding the specifics. I am also happy to open a terminal myself, which helps when we are working out whether something is genuinely hard or just unfamiliar. ======================================================================== POSITIONS I HOLD ======================================================================== 01. Excel should not be running anything that matters. I spent years in benefits administration watching business-critical data sit in workbooks with no validation, no audit trail and no owner. Someone sorts one column without the others and nobody finds out for a quarter. The process rebuild I led was worth about $3M in efficiency and lifted data completeness by 35%, and most of that was moving decisions out of spreadsheets and into something that could enforce a rule. 02. What people ask for is rarely what they need. That is not a licence to overrule them. It means the job is establishing a collective understanding of the actual problem, and getting there takes longer than writing the spec does. I have run in-person workshops for exactly that reason and delivered 30+ rollout sessions off the back of them. The useful feedback never came from the first meeting. It is also how you notice that twenty separate requests are really one configurable feature. 03. Build it configurable, even when hard-coding would protect your budget. The incentive in most product roles runs the wrong way. Hard-code it, and every future change needs a developer, and needing developers is how you justify your funding next year. I took an inherited database and made it admin-configurable so the people using it could serve themselves. It standardised data capture across clients and saved around $200K a year, and it reduced the work my own team could bill for. I would do it again. The alternative is charging the business for a ticket every time somebody wants a dropdown changed. 04. Innovation needs its own space or it does not happen. I am usually the person arguing for exploration, not the one blocking it. But a backlog full of defects wins every argument it is allowed to have, so the experimental work needs somewhere of its own to live, with a budget, a boundary and a date to report back. Left open ended you get a demo that impresses a room once. Left unprotected you get nothing at all. ======================================================================== WHAT I WOULD ASK YOU ======================================================================== What is running on a spreadsheet right now that should not be? Listening for: I would end up accountable for that risk, so I would rather see it early. If I try something and it does not work, what actually happens to me? Listening for: Innovation dies quietly in places where a failed experiment is career damage. How do you know your AI features still work six months after launch? Listening for: If nobody can answer this, there are no evals. When engineering and the business disagree, who decides? Listening for: It will happen. I want to know where I sit when it does. How close does the team actually get to the people using this? Listening for: Distance from users shows up in the roadmap within a quarter. What do you want in twelve months that you have not got now? Listening for: It tells me how much of this is already decided. ======================================================================== FURTHER DETAILS ======================================================================== Outside of my day-to-day career I co-founded Kinghorn & Cooper, a technology consultancy where I am Technical Director. https://kinghorncooper.com ======================================================================== PERSONAL ======================================================================== I am an average golfer who spends a lot of time practicing for not a lot of reward. My partner and I live with our pet tortoise in Bournemouth. We have lived in various places and are always looking for new experiences and our next big move. ======================================================================== AVAILABILITY ======================================================================== Open to forward deployed engineering, applied AI engineering and product roles with real build responsibility. Based in Bournemouth, UK. Reach me through the contact form at https://calumkinghorn.com/#contact.