Principal Software & Platform Engineer
I’m Paul Sellars. I build software and data platforms, set technical direction across teams and stay involved through implementation and handover.
Open to Staff and Principal engineering roles in distributed systems, data platforms and developer infrastructure. Open to US relocation.
16 years building software UK-based · Open to US relocation
01 / Selected work
Lower running costs. Daily releases. A permanent team ready to take over. Here’s how I got there.
European Camping Group
Cloud economics & engineering rebuildTook technical ownership after the in-house team’s departure, moved the booking estate from legacy Rackspace infrastructure to AWS serverless, and built the path to a replacement permanent team.
Foodhub
Platform scale & developer experienceStabilised and scaled the ordering platform through the COVID demand surge, and replaced shared testing bottlenecks with independent environments for each change.
Booking.com / Rentalcars
Product & deployment engineeringBuilt Rentalcars’ deployment platform, CMS, CRM and PCI-DSS-compliant payment card vault—spanning the product and the systems used to release it.
Current work
Through PS Digital, I combine hands-on software engineering with technical leadership. My work includes integration design, reusable delivery tooling and data quality.
I turn ambiguous requirements into interfaces, delivery dependencies and acceptance criteria, and help teams take ongoing ownership.
Client work described at capability levelAlongside this / 2026
Leading a platform rebuild with the clinical founder: offline access across iOS and Android, independent editorial publishing and preparation for operational handover.
The aim is to make children’s hearing support easier to reach and help them participate in education.
02 / Where I help
I work across architecture and implementation. The question is what the business needs to do—and what’s getting in the way.
Cloud architecture, migrations and running costs. Find the constraints, make the trade-offs explicit and build a platform the team can operate.
AWS & Azure · Distributed systems · Infrastructure as code
Deployment platforms, developer tooling and production reliability. Give teams a dependable route from a change to a running service.
CI/CD · Kubernetes · Observability · Secure delivery
Connect data, evaluate models and build the surrounding product. Start with an operational problem and evidence that the approach can solve it.
Data platforms · Model evaluation · Product integration
Applied AI
I work across data preparation, model evaluation and product integration. My approach starts with the operational decision and the evidence needed to support it.
03 / How I work
I stay close to the code and the people who will own it.
That means setting technical direction and building the difficult parts myself. It also means hiring, coaching and making sure the next team has the knowledge and confidence to keep moving.
I founded PS Digital in 2016, after building software and delivery systems in travel and digital media. My first-class BSc in Artificial Intelligence is from Manchester Metropolitan University, awarded in 2010.
Career background on LinkedInNext conversation
A platform, a team, or the way you deliver.
Let’s start there.