David Sivocha

Lateral Technology is a SaaS platform providing automated workflow, decisioning, and financial management tools for clients in the Collections and Legal sectors. The Lateral Platform streamlines operational processes to allow agencies to focus on meaningful customer engagement and outcomes.

As CTO, I am responsible for the engineering strategy and technical footprint across the UK, US, and Canadian markets, leading a distributed team of engineers across multiple time zones (UK, North America, and India). My focus has been on optimising the platform for speed, scalability, and stability as the business expands to serve larger enterprise clients.

I remain hands-on in PHP development, code review, DevOps, and server management, driving platform modernisation, reducing technical debt, and strengthening system resilience across our AWS infrastructure.

A key achievement has been transforming the client onboarding and data ingestion process, reducing onboarding timelines from months to days by redesigning data workflows and collaborating with the Data team to build a more efficient and robust ingestion pipeline.

The platform operates on PHP (Lithium framework), MySQL, NGINX, and PHP-FPM within AWS, supporting a growing base of enterprise clients with complex data and workflow automation requirements.

At CrowdProperty, I led a team of around 10 engineering staff (developers and QA), providing mentoring, technical direction, and process improvement to support the delivery of a complex FinTech platform built on the Laravel stack.

The platform enables consumers to invest in property projects and developers to apply for funding through a regulated P2P lending model, operating under FCA compliance. I worked closely with business stakeholders to ensure platform integrity, security, and compliance across all processes.

My leadership focus was on improving Agile working practices, embedding a TDD-first mindset, and enhancing local development environments using Docker. I was also hands-on in AWS and DevOps, leading CI/CD initiatives that improved release quality and speed.

A core part of my role involved mentoring engineers and leading cross-departmental training to drive better delivery practices and improve collaboration between product and engineering. I was also part of the senior leadership team, bridging technology and business strategy to support investor management and regulatory oversight.

At DivideBuy, I led a multi-national team of around 30 developers, QA testers, and Business Analysts, helping to refactor and scale a rapidly growing FinTech platform. I shaped the technology direction, architecture, and standards across multiple teams while remaining hands-on in PHP, Laravel, and Lumen.

The application comprised several Angular and VueJS frontends communicating with a suite of Microservices and APIs. My team implemented event-driven architectures, message queues, and machine learning-driven feedback loops to improve credit decisioning.

I also led the transition from Waterfall to Agile working practices, introducing CI/CD pipelines, containerised environments in Docker, and deployments to Kubernetes for consistent and scalable delivery.

As a technical and people leader, I focused on mentorship, system performance, and application reliability, ensuring teams were equipped to deliver high-quality, customer-focused products.

At Samarkand, I was responsible for maintaining and extending a suite of WordPress and ECommerce platforms, including custom plugin development integrating with barcode scanning systems and warehouse tools.

I managed server environments hosted on Alibaba Cloud (the regional equivalent of AWS), ensuring uptime, patching, and performance. The role also included maintaining Laravel components and providing infrastructure support for third-party clients such as Black Spark Media and Connect365.

I led the migration of uCribs from WordPress to a full Laravel application, optimising the database using the Haversine formula for geospatial queries and implementing KnockoutJS to provide Single Page Application interactivity.

Managed a fully load-balanced AWS infrastructure using OpsWorks and custom Chef recipes, integrating third-party services like Stripe and Mandrill for payment and email automation.

Lead Developer for a web agency delivering bespoke client solutions in WordPress, Laravel, and Prestashop. Built and maintained reusable WordPress Plugins and managed client hosting environments.

Early-career experience providing full-stack development services in Laravel and Django, delivering internal systems and custom applications. At UK Fuels, I built a Python-based Management System for sales operations and reporting, introducing database migrations and role-based data views.