Leadership
- Technology strategy
- Team building
- Recruitment & performance management
- Developer mentoring
- Product ownership
- Budget & vendor management
- Client demos
- Change management
East Cleveland, UK · Technology Director, Mastercopy
PaulBenson
Technology director & systems architect
Eighteen years of building the thing, running it in production and leading the team that does the same, from NHS ward software to DocFlow, an ISO 27001-certified AI document platform I built from scratch and lead.
- Experience
- 18+ years
- Now
- Head of technology, Mastercopy
- Compliance
- ISO 27001 · ISO 9001 · SOC 2
- Runs
- Team · Product · Production
01 / Profile
I set the technology direction, and I still write the code.
Technology leader based in East Cleveland with 18 years of writing software, running it in production and managing the people who build it.
Technology Director at Mastercopy, where I set the strategy, run the development team and am principal architect of DocFlow, an AI document platform I built from scratch to replace a third-party product. It is now ISO 27001 certified and SOC 2 compliant. I recruit and line-manage the engineers, I look after production on Hetzner and on client sites, and I still write code most days.
02 / Career
Career history
-
→Present
Technology Director
Mastercopy Thornaby, UK
Leadership. Head of technology for the company. I set the strategy, own the technology budget and the vendor relationships including HP, and report to management on delivery. I built the in-house development team, handle recruitment and performance management, and agree the product roadmap with management before turning it into a GitHub backlog that we deliver in sprints.
Engineering practice. I run adversarial development: changes are attacked and tested for failure before they go out. I wrote the automated test suites that let junior developers make production changes safely, so a small team can take on more work.
Product. Principal architect and lead developer of DocFlow, a TypeScript document platform with AI classification, AES-256 per-document encryption, multi-stage workflow automation, e-signatures, compliance tracking and full-text search. I led the introduction of AIDA, the AI engine behind it, which does auto-classification, data extraction and on-premises document chat. It uses Mixture of Experts models so it runs on ordinary hardware.
Operations and compliance. DocFlow was written to run on Linux or Windows, on-premises or in the cloud. I run the production estate on Hetzner servers and on client sites: deployment, backups, patching, monitoring and incident response. I also bought and deployed Raspberry Pi monitoring nodes that report copier toner levels from client sites back to central systems. I run the ISO 9001 quality system and played a key part in getting ISO 27001, which meant changing and documenting how work is done across the business.
- Team leadership
- Recruitment & line management
- Technology strategy
- Budget & vendors
- Product roadmap
- Sprints
- Adversarial testing
- TypeScript
- DocFlow
- AIDA
- Hetzner
- Linux & Windows
- IoT / Raspberry Pi
- ISO 9001
- ISO 27001
- SOC 2
-
→1 yr 3 mo
IT Officer – Web Development
North Yorkshire Council North Yorkshire, UK
Developed, supported and hosted websites for council departments and for schools and companies buying services through NYES, the council’s traded services arm. Worked directly with each customer on what they needed and ran the Plesk web servers hosting their sites.
- Plesk
- WordPress
- Divi
- Web server management
- Customer requirements
-
→1 yr 1 mo
Strategic Technical Account Manager
Aqueous Consulting Ltd Runcorn, Cheshire
Technical SEO for clients whose sites needed hands-on work. Audited sites for performance, crawlability and structural problems and turned the findings into a plan the client could act on.
- Ahrefs
- Google Search Console
- Technical audits
- WordPress
-
→13 yrs 3 mo
Technical Developer
iBleep Ltd Kirkleatham, Redcar & Cleveland
Lead engineer on the company’s NHS clinical communication platform for 13 years. Developed the web application and the native iOS and Android apps, ran the Windows Server and SQL Server estate on-premises and remotely, and looked after all internal IT: staff systems, local servers and network printers. Built the reporting suite, managed a fleet of centrally monitored connected devices across NHS sites, and led hospital go-lives on site, training nurses and doctors to use the system.
- ASP
- SQL Server
- Windows Server
- iOS / Xcode
- Android
- Device fleet management
- NHS go-lives
-
→3 yrs
Early career
Various employers Cambridgeshire & Teesside
A range of roles that laid broad technical and commercial foundations: Junior Web Developer at Eliteology Ltd, building ASP.NET web applications; Computer Technician at Brightboy Media, building PCs and installing networks; Telephone Sales and Floor Manager at Inbound Solutions; and Broadband Technical Support at Garlands Call Centre.
- ASP.NET 2.0
- C#
- XHTML / CSS
- IIS 6
- SQL Server 2000
- Networking
- PC builds
03 / Achievements
Key achievements
-
Replaced Mastercopy’s third-party document product with DocFlow, built in-house from scratch and taken through ISO 27001 certification and SOC 2.
-
Built and run the development team: recruited and line-managed the engineers, and set up the sprint, review and release process.
-
Wrote the test suites and adversarial review process that let junior developers ship production code safely.
-
Run production from Hetzner servers to client on-premises installs, on Linux or Windows.
-
Got Mastercopy to ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 and keep both current.
-
Led the introduction of AIDA, adding AI classification, extraction and on-premises document chat to DocFlow.
-
Led a live NHS platform for 13 years, including hospital go-lives and native mobile apps.
04 / Skills
Technical skills
Engineering practice
- Adversarial code review
- Automated test suites
- Sprints & backlog
- GitHub
- Release management
- Systems architecture
Standards & compliance
- ISO 27001 (achieved & maintained)
- ISO 9001 (Quality)
- SOC 2 (Security)
AI & machine learning
- Custom AI development
- Model training
- Mixture of Experts
- On-premises AI
- Document intelligence
- AI chat assistants
Languages & frameworks
- TypeScript
- Node.js
- Next.js
- JavaScript
- C#
- ASP / ASP.NET
- PHP
Data & infrastructure
- SQL Server
- MySQL
- Linux
- Windows Server
- Hetzner
- IIS
- Plesk
- DNS & TLS
- Backups & monitoring
- IoT / Raspberry Pi
CMS & mobile
- WordPress
- Divi
- iOS / Xcode
- Android
Tools
- Visual Studio
- GitHub
- AI coding tools
05 / Contact
Get intouch.
References available on request.