Robert Entwistle

Resume

Technology and engineering leader with 15+ years of experience defining technical direction, designing software architecture, and delivering SaaS products and platforms. Combines hands-on engineering experience with an INSEAD MBA and a strong understanding of customer and business needs. Experienced in evaluating technical tradeoffs, guiding development teams, modernizing platforms, and making pragmatic decisions that balance cost, scalability, maintainability, and business value.

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

Selected Experience

Independent Technology Consultant

Independent Consulting

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

Provide independent technology consulting across SaaS architecture, application modernization, data processing, and AI development. Work directly with clients to identify business and technical problems, evaluate alternatives, define technical direction, and deliver solutions.

  • Identified a performance bottleneck in an image-processing workflow and led its redesign from technical analysis through production deployment. Evaluated alternative worker models and introduced manifest-driven parallel processing to improve throughput and resource utilization. Nearly doubled processing capacity without increasing infrastructure requirements, while identifying opportunities for reporting and AI-assisted analysis.
  • Investigated recurring processing delays in a multi-tenant SaaS platform and traced the problem to competing background workloads. Evaluated how jobs were queued and allocated resources, then redesigned job coordination and orchestration to reduce contention between tenants. Improved processing reliability and resource stability without requiring additional server capacity.
  • Identified recurring usability and maintenance issues in a legacy web application and defined a modernization strategy using React and TypeScript. Led the redesign of the frontend architecture to separate application behavior and business logic from presentation components. This reduced coupling and subsequently allowed the component library to be replaced without rewriting application screens or core business logic.
  • Scoped, designed, and built four serverless AI prototypes using AWS Bedrock, exploring document analysis, image-quality and duplicate detection, contract review, and customer-feedback classification. Assessed each use case against accuracy, technical feasibility, implementation complexity, operating costs, and practical business value to determine which applications warranted further investment.

Senior Software Engineer

Harbor Compliance - SaaS Government Compliance Platform

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

Drove improvements across database performance, cloud infrastructure, integrations, and application security, combining architectural decision-making with hands-on engineering and production delivery.

  • Investigated recurring support issues initially attributed to application defects and challenged a proposed database infrastructure upgrade. Analyzed query performance across more than 167 million records and identified targeted CTE and indexing optimizations as a more effective solution. Reduced critical query execution times from over 20 seconds to under 1 second, avoided approximately $3,000 per month in planned infrastructure costs, and reduced related support tickets by 50-60%.
  • Led the migration of a production database to Azure Flexible Server, replacing a proposed dump-and-restore process that would have required an estimated 8-10 hours of downtime. Evaluated alternatives and selected Azure Database Migration Service based on operational risk, feasibility, validation requirements, and rollback options. Planned and coordinated the production migration, completing it with approximately 2 hours of downtime.
  • Redesigned an Appian integration that relied on weekly full-database synchronization, leaving downstream data stale for up to a week and repeatedly transferring millions of unchanged records. Implemented incremental synchronization using Azure Functions to transfer only updated records, improving data freshness while reducing unnecessary processing and data movement.
  • Supported SOC 2 preparation by defining the scope and approach for application security testing using OWASP ZAP. Assessed findings against severity, exploitability, and operational impact, then delivered prioritized remediation recommendations to the security team. These recommendations informed platform hardening ahead of formal compliance activities.

Head of Technology

dPivot - Data & ETL SaaS Startup

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

Owned technology and product direction for a small SaaS company, working directly with clients on business opportunities, commercial proposals, and product requirements. Set technical strategy, made architectural decisions, and guided employees and contractors through engineering delivery.

  • Led the consolidation of eight overlapping legacy systems into a single multi-tenant AWS platform. Evaluated application dependencies, API compatibility, infrastructure costs, and migration risks before defining the architecture and guiding implementation with internal developers and contractors. Completed the migration with zero downtime, preserved existing client integrations, and retired three servers. The consolidated platform reduced duplicated maintenance and established a shared foundation for future development.
  • Worked directly with a client to modernize a reporting process that took nearly a full day for more than 50 product managers. Architected and led development of a tenant-isolated ETL and reporting solution using AWS Athena, S3, and Parquet, avoiding continuously running dedicated database infrastructure. Reduced reporting time to approximately 10 minutes and extended the solution to compare product coverage against vehicle population data, helping identify underserved market segments.
  • Evaluated third-party warranty platforms against client requirements, integration complexity, cost, and long-term maintenance. Determined that extending the existing multi-tenant architecture was preferable to introducing a separate application. Defined the technical approach and led development of warranty claims, review, receipt, and ERP integration workflows while preserving the shared platform foundation. The solution remains in active use.
  • Directed modernization of a legacy CodeIgniter platform to address architectural limitations, maintenance costs, and difficulty recruiting developers with relevant expertise. Evaluated framework alternatives and migration tradeoffs before selecting Laravel, React, and TypeScript. Introduced REST APIs supporting a catalog of more than 50 million records and layered Nginx, CloudFront, and Redis caching across load-balanced AWS infrastructure to improve scalability and resource efficiency.

Head of Technology

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

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

Led technology strategy, software architecture, engineering delivery, and product development for a loyalty SaaS platform, working directly with customers and business leadership on technical decisions, priorities, and investment.

  • Identified an opportunity to replace support-dependent promotion management with a customer self-service portal. Worked with clients to define requirements and developed the business case, product scope, and delivery plan, securing executive approval. Led a small engineering team through technical design, architecture, development, and rollout, remaining hands-on where needed. Launched the portal and additional capabilities in approximately 6 months, giving customers direct control over promotions and access to reporting.
  • Led the migration of the loyalty SaaS platform from legacy datacenter infrastructure to AWS. Evaluated architectural alternatives, operating costs, reliability requirements, and migration risks before defining the target infrastructure. Coordinated the development team and rollout, transitioning the platform while improving its reliability and reducing infrastructure expenditure by more than $7,000 per month.
  • Owned technical and product prioritization for the platform, working directly with clients to understand business needs and identify improvements. Evaluated proposed features against customer impact, implementation complexity, architectural constraints, operating cost, and engineering capacity. Made technical tradeoffs, established priorities, and worked with the development team to scope and deliver changes that supported both customer needs and the long-term maintainability of the platform.
  • Improved the quality of customer-facing mobile applications through usability and code reviews, identifying implementation issues and providing targeted code examples. Mentored developers transitioning from Java to JavaScript development patterns, helping the team improve implementation quality and consistency.

CRM Solutions Manager

Apple - EMEIA Division

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

Worked across Apple's EMEIA organization on CRM and internal technology initiatives, combining business analysis, solution development, technical recommendations, and collaboration with teams in Europe and Cupertino.

  • Identified opportunities to consolidate overlapping internal systems by working with business stakeholders and technical owners across departments. Evaluated existing systems, developed a consolidation business case, and presented recommendations to executive leadership, including the CIO. Built cross-functional support for the proposal without direct authority over the teams involved.
  • Worked with EMEIA Education sales leadership to identify opportunities for sharing successful sales approaches across the region. Designed and built an internal website where teams could share customer success stories, sales strategies, and practical tactics for selling Apple products, helping colleagues learn from successful engagements and apply those approaches to new opportunities.
  • Analyzed database structure and SQL reporting performance for a telecom sales tracking system used by carriers including Orange, France Telecom, and O2. Identified performance bottlenecks and recommended improvements to the team responsible for implementation. Those recommendations informed a subsequent database migration, with staging tests showing approximately 25% faster reporting.

Engagement Manager

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

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

Led enterprise SaaS implementations, managing client relationships, technical coordination, project delivery, and commercial responsibilities.

  • Took over an at-risk Thermo Fisher implementation from another manager. Worked directly with the client and technical team to clarify outstanding requirements, resolve delivery issues, and rebuild confidence in the project. Successfully delivered the solution to specification.
  • Took over a Gilbarco CRM customization project after management identified delivery delays, before those delays affected the client. Reassessed the outstanding work, revised the delivery plan, and coordinated technical dependencies to complete the implementation ahead of schedule. The successful delivery contributed to subsequent account expansion.
  • Managed enterprise SaaS implementations across requirements, budgets, schedules, client relationships, and technical delivery. Worked directly with customer stakeholders and engineering teams to resolve implementation challenges. Also mentored engineers and managers on the platform's Java-like configuration language, helping teams address technical problems and improve delivery quality.

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.

Technology Leadership & Architecture
Technical strategy, Software architecture, Systems design, Technology evaluation, Platform modernization, Multi-tenant SaaS, Cloud architecture, API design, Systems integration, Technical decision-making, Engineering delivery
Languages & Frameworks
TypeScript, JavaScript, SQL, PHP, Node.js, React, Next.js, Laravel, HTML/CSS, Bash
Cloud & Infrastructure
AWS, Azure, EC2, Lambda, S3, API Gateway, SQS, CloudFront, Aurora, Redis, Load balancing, CI/CD pipelines, Blue/green deployments
Data & Integration
ETL architecture, Data pipelines, SQL optimization, AWS Athena, Parquet, REST APIs, OpenAPI, JWT, Salesforce, HubSpot
Databases
MySQL, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, MongoDB
AI & Automation
Amazon Bedrock, Generative AI prototyping, Serverless AI workflows, Model evaluation, Prompt engineering, AI-assisted development, Workflow automation
Product & Delivery
Product discovery, Technical discovery, Requirements analysis, Solution design, Technical roadmapping, MVP definition, Prioritization, Stakeholder management, Client engagement, Jira, Confluence