Summary
Rick Clare is a seasoned software leader and hands-on engineer with over 25 years’ experience building and leading teams for web applications across Ruby-on-Rails and Elixir/Phoenix stacks. He has served as CTO and Lead Engineer on fintech, government and media platforms—shipping production systems for clients like BBC Maestro, FreeAgent, Legal & General/MyFutureNow and the Welsh Government—while also replatforming and optimising CI/CD, testing and deployment pipelines. Comfortable from backend APIs (GraphQL/Absinthe, OAuth2, JWT) to real-time front-ends (Phoenix LiveView, Typescript, Tailwind), he combines product-focused engineering with devops know-how across Heroku, AWS, Azure and Fly.io. A pragmatic maintainer of legacy systems and builder of greenfield apps, Rick often improves test performance and developer workflows (notably large RSpec speedups and GitHub Actions CI setups). He balances remote and on-site client work across Europe and the US, and—when not shipping code—has even taken sabbaticals crafting bespoke carpentry projects in Bristol, reflecting a practical, detail-minded approach.
11 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
2:1 BSc Hons Computer Science, 2:1 BSc Hons Computer Science at University of Nottingham
A-Levels: Maths Physics Chemistry IT, A-Levels: Maths Physics Chemistry IT at Poynton County High School