I take on the engineering work you can't afford to get wrong.
I'm Gareth Lowrie, a hands-on engineering leader based in Newcastle upon Tyne. For eight years I've built and led engineering on a multi-tenant SaaS platform, most recently as Deputy Head of Engineering at Hive HR. I'm now available for contract work: putting AI features into production, modernising TypeScript and AWS platforms, delivering high-risk migrations, and leading engineering teams.
Open to contract work, remote across the UK or on site in the North East
What teams are hiring contractors for, and where I've already done it
These are the briefs that come up most often in UK contract listings right now. Each one links to the detail in my CV, including what I built at Hive and what it achieved.
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Putting AI features and agents into productionAI engineer, AI architect and technical lead contracts
Built Hive's first generative AI features on AWS Bedrock: an analytics assistant that answers questions about survey results, AI classification of employee comments, and automatically generated survey insights. They're designed so the AI can never see more data than the person using it, with automated evaluations and a model chosen per task to control cost. Auto Insights went from five months in progress to a working feature in about two weeks.
How the AI features were built -
TypeScript and Node.js platforms on AWSSenior, lead and principal engineer contracts
Delivered a public REST API on AWS Lambda from specification to production, reusing the platform's own business logic so it can never contradict the product. Moved ten services to Node 24 and strict TypeScript, which cut internal build times from over 30 minutes to under 10.
The public API case study -
Migrating data or search without customers noticingPlatform, data and modernisation contracts
Retired Elasticsearch from the whole platform as the sole engineer. I rebuilt over 100 APIs on MongoDB Atlas Search one endpoint at a time, using Sentry to verify that every metric matched Elasticsearch and that query times were on par or faster. Zero disruption, no data loss, and about £2,000 a month saved.
The migration case study -
Shipping faster, including with AI-assisted engineeringDelivery, developer experience and CI/CD contracts
Embedded AI-assisted engineering across the team, encoding our standards into the tools. Releases rose from about 80 to 170–180 a month with one fewer engineer, and code reaches production about 10 minutes after merge.
Where this sits in my experience -
Responsible AI and governanceAI governance, guardrails and adoption contracts
Experienced with ISO and Cyber Essentials audits, and actively learning AI governance and the new ISO/IEC 42001 standard. I combine that with hands-on experience of AI guardrails, privacy by design and evaluation, to help shape AI strategy that is responsible and ready for audit.
My view on responsible AI -
Leading an engineering teamInterim and fractional engineering lead roles
Co-lead an engineering department while staying hands-on. I line-manage engineers through one-to-ones, performance reviews and 9-box assessments, co-wrote the career ladder and promotion framework, run the full hiring loop, and share out-of-hours incident cover.
My people leadership
Based on UK contract listings for senior TypeScript, AWS, AI and engineering leadership work in October 2026.
How I add value
From problem to customers
Building is no longer the hard part. What I'm best at is taking an idea or a problem, drawing the real requirements out of people, and getting it from A to B, all the way to customers. It's problem solving and project management together, and it's the part I enjoy most.
Bringing the right people together
I bring together the people who feel the problem, work out with them how to solve it, and then have the technical depth to build the solution myself. Auto Insights went from five months in progress to working in about two weeks. Retiring Elasticsearch, a job that had always lost out to roadmap work, happened with zero disruption.
Experience over output
Anyone can generate code now. My value is years of lessons about what won't work, where systems hit their limits, and which decisions age badly, because I've had to live with my own for eight years.
Where I see engineering going
Engineers are moving towards building and maintaining a software factory: an automated development life cycle, defined in code, that other teams can use directly. People still review the high-risk changes by hand. I've seen the early version of this already, with the team more than doubling its monthly releases. I can help your team build its own.
Founder of Paper Porch
Alongside my day job I founded Paper Porch, a website that uses AI to let people turn a photo of their home into a custom art print, delivered to their door with no human intervention. Orders go straight to our third-party print partner, Prodigi, and payments are handled by Stripe.
It's the same thing I bring to contracts: taking an idea all the way to paying customers, then automating everything in between.
- AI preview
- Styled in a minute or two
- Payments
- Stripe
- Fulfilment
- Prodigi, printed and shipped automatically
- Delivery
- Free tracked UK delivery
Ways to work together
Three shapes of engagement. Most clients start with whichever fits the problem they already have.
| Contract technical lead | Fractional engineering lead | Platform review | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | Full time in your team and your codebase, owning one hard piece of work from start to finish. | One to three days a week leading your engineers: technical direction, priorities, line management, hiring and delivery. | Two weeks reviewing your architecture, delivery process, security and readiness for AI. |
| Good for | A migration, an AI feature or a platform upgrade with a deadline. | Teams between leaders, or too small for a full-time head of engineering. | Deciding what to fix first before committing budget. |
| Usual length | Three to six months | Three months, then reviewed | Two weeks, ending in a written plan |
| Pricing | Day rate | Day rate for a set number of days a week | Fixed price, agreed up front |
I'll quote once I understand the work.
How a contract usually runs
A first call
Thirty minutes on what you're trying to ship, by when, and what's in the way. No charge.
A written scope
The outcome, the length, who I'll work with and how we'll know it's done, on one page.
Work in your team
Your repository, your rituals and your on-call rota, with a short written update every week.
A clean handover
Documentation, runbooks and a team that can run it without me.
About me
I joined Hive HR as a software engineer in 2018 and worked my way to Deputy Head of Engineering, writing code the whole way. Most of my week is still hands-on.
The work I'm proudest of is the high-stakes kind: retiring a search engine with zero disruption, removing passwords from sign-in, and putting AI features in front of customers safely. I also manage and develop engineers, and co-wrote our career ladder and promotion framework. My CV explains each piece of work: the problem, what I did, and the result.
What I work in. TypeScript, Node.js, GraphQL and React. MongoDB Atlas, Atlas Search and Elasticsearch. AWS: Lambda, ECS, SQS and SNS, Bedrock, and Terraform. R and Python for analysis. GitHub Actions and Sentry. BSc in Computer Forensics, first class.