Robert Entwistle

Resume

Technical product leader and solutions architect with 15+ years turning customer problems into practical, commercially sensible SaaS products and platforms. Owned initiatives from problem definition and customer discovery through prioritization, architecture, delivery, and production rollout. Strong at balancing customer value, cost, technical feasibility, and future flexibility while remaining close to implementation.

Selected experience: Apple · BigMachines, a startup acquired by Oracle · Harbor Compliance · dPivot

Selected Experience

Technology Consultant

Independent Consulting

West Palm Beach, FL, Remote (08/2025 - Present)

Consulting engagements focused on SaaS modernization, data workflows, multi-tenant architecture, and practical AI applied to real business processes.

  • Owned the end-to-end redesign of a constrained image-ingestion workflow after identifying it as a throughput bottleneck limiting client value. Re-architected the process to parallel execution, nearly doubling throughput with no infrastructure increase, and defined the follow-on product roadmap for advanced reporting and AI-assisted analytics.
  • Customer processing delays and recurring complaints exposed a scalability problem in the multi-tenant platform. Evaluated the workload design and found that four independent queues, including image ingestion, were competing for the same resources. Prioritized a shared orchestration model that balanced tenant isolation, processing reliability, and infrastructure cost rather than adding server capacity. Stabilized resource usage, reduced contention, and defined the roadmap for migrating the remaining workloads.
  • Repeated client complaints showed that the legacy Bootstrap interface was limiting usability and needed more than incremental fixes. Prioritized a React and TypeScript modernization, using a UI abstraction layer to separate application behavior from the component library and reduce future migration cost. When PrimeReact changed its licensing, moved the application to Mantine without rewriting screens or business logic, preserving the modernization investment and avoiding a second full rebuild.
  • Built four serverless AI prototypes to develop practical experience applying AI to realistic business workflows: compliance analysis, image-quality and duplicate detection, contract review, and customer-feedback classification. Evaluated Amazon Bedrock, RAG, LangChain, AWS Lambda, and structured outputs, comparing accuracy, feasibility, operating cost, and implementation complexity across each use case.

Senior Software Engineer

Harbor Compliance - SaaS Government Compliance Platform

Lancaster, PA, Remote (07/2024 - 07/2025)

Combined product analysis, technical design, and hands-on delivery across platform reliability, data performance, cloud migration, integrations, and security for a government compliance SaaS product.

  • Recurring support tickets were being treated as application defects, while the proposed solution was a costly database upgrade. Reframed the issue as a query-performance problem, analyzed the 167M+ row database, and prioritized targeted CTE and indexing changes over additional infrastructure. Reduced key query times from more than 20 seconds to under 1 second, avoided approximately $3,000 per month in planned database costs, and cut the related ticket category by 50-60%.
  • The existing dump-and-restore process would have required an 8-10 hour maintenance window, creating operational risk and customer disruption. Evaluated migration options and selected Azure Database Migration Service to move the stand-alone database to Azure Flexible Server, balancing downtime, implementation feasibility, validation, and rollback safety. Defined the dependencies, risks, rollback procedures, and acceptance criteria, then led the production rollout, reducing downtime to approximately 2 hours.
  • A weekly full-database synchronization left Appian data stale for up to a week and repeatedly transferred millions of records that had not changed. Prioritized an incremental approach that sent only updated records, using Azure Functions to provide a practical, low-overhead alternative to more frequent full refreshes. Eliminated the week-long staleness window while substantially reducing unnecessary data processing and transfer.
  • Upcoming SOC 2 compliance work required clear visibility into platform vulnerabilities and their business impact. Defined penetration-testing scope and approach using OWASP ZAP, then prioritized findings by severity, exploitability, and operational risk. Delivered actionable recommendations that security team used to harden platform before formal compliance work.

Technical Product Manager

dPivot - Data & ETL SaaS Startup

London, UK (10/2018 - 07/2024)

Owned product and technical direction for a data and media SaaS startup, spanning customer discovery, roadmaps, backlog prioritization, architecture, hands-on delivery, and platform modernization.

  • Overlapping systems and duplicate client requests were increasing maintenance effort and fragmenting product development across the SaaS platform. Owned roadmap and backlog, pruning low-value work and prioritizing reusable capabilities based on client impact, commercial value, effort, and platform fit. Consolidated 8 systems into a single multi-tenant AWS platform, retired 3 servers, and created shared foundation for integrations, reporting, and future growth.
  • A full-day manual reporting process was delaying customer insight and consuming significant operational time. Defined product opportunity and prioritized tenant-isolated AWS Athena and Parquet architecture that delivered required reporting without cost of continuously running database infrastructure. Secured approval and delivered ETL pipeline that reduced processing to about 10 minutes, lowered ongoing reporting costs, and created foundation for new management trend reporting.
  • Evaluated warranty platforms against client workflow, cost, and delivery needs, and found no practical fit. Chose to extend shared multi-tenant SaaS platform, preserving common product foundation while adding client-specific claim, review, receipt, and ERP capabilities. Led discovery through rollout; system remains in active use.
  • Legacy CodeIgniter platform was increasing maintenance and development costs while making experienced candidates difficult to find. Defined modernization roadmap that moved backend to Laravel, rebuilt frontend in React and TypeScript, and separated monolithic media and data system into REST APIs serving 50-million-row catalog. Added layered Nginx, CloudFront, and Redis caching across load-balanced AWS infrastructure to improve scalability and reduce server resource use and cost.

Head of Technology

Mobilize Systems (acquired by Trust Payments) - Loyalty SaaS Platform

London, UK (07/2014 - 09/2018)

Led product and technology for a loyalty SaaS platform, working across customer needs, product direction, business cases, architecture, delivery, platform strategy, and team development.

  • Customers depended on internal teams to manage promotions, limiting control and slowing changes. Defined business case, product vision, MVP, and roadmap for self-service portal, secured CEO and executive buy-in, and led small team through architecture and delivery. Launched platform and additional features in about 6 months.
  • Datacenter infrastructure was limiting reliability and driving unnecessary operating cost. Evaluated migration options and defined AWS target architecture that balanced reliability, cost, implementation effort, and transition risk. Led planning and rollout, brought development team onto new platform, and reduced infrastructure costs by more than $7,000 per month.
  • Worked directly with clients to turn feedback and requirements into practical product improvements. Kept a prioritized feature list based on customer impact, confidence, effort, technical constraints, and available team capacity, then scoped and sequenced selected work with development team.
  • Raised quality of customer-facing mobile apps by reviewing usability and implementation, providing targeted code examples, and mentoring Java-background team on JavaScript development patterns.

CRM Solutions Manager

Apple - EMEIA Division

London, UK / Cupertino, CA (10/2011 - 10/2013)

Worked across CRM, sales enablement, reporting, and internal systems for Apple's EMEIA organization, translating business needs into solutions with teams in Europe and Cupertino.

  • Identified overlapping internal systems across departments by working directly with business and technical owners. Built the consolidation business case and presented it to executive leadership, including the CIO, securing cross-functional buy-in without having unilateral authority.
  • Partnered with EMEIA Education sales leadership to identify planning pain points and translate them into requirements for an internal sales enablement system. Built a shared resource combining iPad, Mac, and selected iPhone data with real examples and successful sales strategies, giving teams a faster way to plan customer opportunities and support Apple hardware adoption.
  • Reviewed database structure and reporting performance for a telecom sales tracking system used across carriers including Orange, France Telecom, and O2. Proposed improvements that informed a subsequent migration by the database team, with staging tests showing roughly a 25% improvement in reporting speed.

Engagement Manager

BigMachines (startup acquired by Oracle) - SaaS CRM Solutions using Salesforce

London, UK (03/2011 - 10/2011)

Managed enterprise CRM and configuration projects across requirements, client relationships, delivery, budget, schedule, and technical coordination.

  • Took over an at-risk Thermo Fisher implementation from another manager, rebuilt client trust, clarified outstanding requirements, and delivered the platform to specification. The relationship recovered to the point that the client later offered me a role.
  • Took over the Gilbarco CRM customization project after management identified delivery was falling behind, before delays affected the client. Replanned the work, coordinated technical dependencies, and delivered ahead of schedule, contributing to account upsell and contract expansion.
  • Managed enterprise implementations across requirements, budget, schedule, and delivery while serving as liaison between client stakeholders and engineering. Mentored engineers and managers on the platform's Java-like configuration language to improve delivery quality and resolve technical issues.

Education & Certifications

  • MBA, INSEAD
  • B.S. Mechanical Engineering, UCLA
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate

Languages and Affiliations

  • English (Native), Japanese (Fluent), French (Fluent)
  • INSEAD Alumni Association — Active member, South Florida

Technical Focus

Mostly AWS and Azure, PHP and Laravel on the backend along with Node, React and TypeScript on the front, SQL underneath all of it with NoSQL for unstructured and JSON-heavy data. The common thread is APIs, data platforms, and modernizing systems that have outgrown how they were originally built, increasingly with AI in the workflow.

Product / Solutions
Product discovery, Technical discovery, Problem definition, Roadmapping, MVP definition, Requirements, Epics, User stories, Backlog prioritization, Jira, Confluence, Stakeholder management, Client solution design, API design, Systems architecture, Integrations
AI / Automation
Amazon Bedrock, LangChain, RAG, AI workflows, AI-assisted delivery, Task decomposition, Prompt design
Languages & Frameworks
TypeScript, Javascript, SQL, React, Next.js, Node.js, PHP, Laravel, HTML/CSS, Bash
Cloud / Infrastructure
AWS, EC2, Aurora, Lambda, S3, API Gateway, SQS, CloudFront, Load balancing, Azure, Redis, CI/CD pipelines, Blue/green deployments
APIs / Data
REST, OpenAPI, JWT, ETL, Salesforce, HubSpot
Databases
MySQL, PostgreSQL, Athena, DynamoDB, MongoDB