Tech Paired Podcast

Is it ever too late to reinvent your career? In this episode of Tech Paired, Michael Phair is joined by Gerry Thomas, an experienced IT leader whose career journey proves that where you start does not have to define where you end up. After spending 15 years in retail management, Gerry made the decision to return to education, retrain in technology, and build a career that would eventually see him...

What does AI-first engineering actually look like inside a real software organisation? In this episode of Tech Paired, Michael Phair is joined by Allan Mayberry, Senior Director of Engineering at Planet DDS, to explore how AI is reshaping software development, engineering leadership, team design, hiring, security, and the future of technical careers. Allan leads a 100+ person engineering organisat...

In this episode of Tech Paired, Michael and Stuart sit down with Cameron Lepper, Director of Platform Engineering at Tribal Group to explore what it really takes to build platforms, teams, and meaningful careers in modern tech. Cameron leads Platform Engineering, SRE, DBA, and FinOps across a global cloud product suite, with teams spanning the UK, Philippines, Australia, and beyond. But this conve...

What does it really take to scale IT globally without creating chaos? In this episode of Tech Paired, we sit down with Donald McNeil an experienced IT executive whose leadership career spans organisations including Dexcom, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Life Technologies, and Fisher Scientific. Across that journey, Donald has led complex IT organisations supporting multi-site manufacturing, distributio...

Patty O’Callaghan, Technical Director, Head of AI for the Architecture & Engineering Group at Charles River Laboratories and a Google Developer Expert in AI & Cloud joins us on Tech Paired to unpack what software development looks like in an AI-first world. This is a real-world conversation about how engineering teams are changing right now: AI writing code, developers evolving into archit...

Fraser Ferguson - Founder & CEO of KubeNet, serial entrepreneur, and former FTSE 250 board member joins Michael Phair and Stuart Alexander for a wide-ranging conversation on what it really takes to build technology businesses that survive multiple eras of change. Fraser’s career spans nearly three decades of UK tech evolution: from early internet and the dotcom boom, through telecoms and recru...

Andy Doyle, Chief Product & AI Leader, joins Michael Phair and Stuart Alexander to explore how the best tech leaders turn chaos into clarity. Andy shares lessons from scaling SaaS, IoT, and AI ventures, and why structure, empathy, and listening are the hidden forces behind high-performing teams. We dig into why so many growing companies mistake their product teams for “feature factories ,” how...

Federico, CEO of Quorum Cyber, traces his journey from Buenos Aires to building one of the UK’s fastest-growing cybersecurity firms. We dig into the brutal truths of leadership, AI’s real impact on security work, why SMBs are targets, and why your security program should favor platforms and simplicity. We end on quantum risk and a surprising metric: birthdays not missed. Quorum Cyber (founded Edin...