Director of Technology · Brooklyn, NY

Sam Ayres

A decade of building.
Now building teams that build.

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Impact

$15M+
Annual revenue across the pharma brand portfolio supported by the engineering team I built.
100+
Compliant, MLR-ready deliveries shipped per year on the pipeline I built.
16M+
Monthly requests served by the AWS infrastructure I architected.
40–60%
Faster production cycles across email, banner, and site pipelines.

Internal Tools

Internal
Production Pipeline
Internal tooling the team ships on every day. Three sub-pipelines for the three deliverable types: Gulp + MJML for emails, Gulp + Mustache for banners, Gulp + Mustache + SASS for static sites.
Stack: Gulp · MJML · Mustache · SASS · Node
Internal
Site-Watch Tool
Daily competitor monitoring across grouped site lists. Snapshots text, diffs against the archive, captures a screenshot only when something changed, and emails per-group digests with a link to the full HTML report.
Stack: Python · Playwright · BeautifulSoup · diff-match-patch
Internal
Timeline Generator
Internal web app that turns flat Excel project exports into color-coded waterfall reports. Output as both an editable Excel for the PM and a polished PDF for the client. Eliminated hours of weekly manual formatting.
Stack: Python · Flask · openpyxl · ReportLab · Tailwind
Infrastructure
AWS Topology
The AWS topology hosting twenty-plus brand sites. Each brand gets isolated staging, UAT, and production environments with one identical deploy and rollback flow built directly against the AWS API.
Stack: Gatsby · Route 53 · CloudFront · S3 · Lambda@Edge

Selected Work

Personal · Open source

locc.it

A one-time secret sharing tool. The sender encrypts in the browser with a generated passcode, the server stores only the ciphertext on a deadline, and the recipient opens the link exactly once before it is deleted.

Stack: React · Express · MongoDB · CryptoJS
Personal · Open source

Drupal → Bitbucket Automation

A Drupal 7 module that hooks into the project-create event and automatically provisions a private Bitbucket repository with the agency workflow already enforced: branch protection, approval rules, push restrictions, and PR webhooks.

Stack: PHP · Drupal 7 · Bitbucket REST API · OAuth2

Experience

2021 – Present
CultHealth New York, NY
Director of Technology

Hired to build the engineering function from zero. Now run the team that handles all digital web projects for the company. Five engineers (3 senior, 1 mid, 1 junior), with 2 direct reports.

2020 – 2021
Heartbeat New York, NY
Senior Web Developer

Created React SPAs and Drupal sites for health brands. Drove migration of legacy Drupal logic into Symfony microservices and built reusable UI components.

2016 – 2020
Circle Interactive Bristol, UK
Web Developer

Full-stack development with React, REST APIs, and CiviCRM. Managed CI/CD pipelines and mentored junior developers.

2014 – 2016
Cap2 Solutions Bath, UK
Junior Web Developer

PHP and JavaScript feature work on a sports-management platform built with Angular and Symfony.

2012 – 2013
Nokia Siemens Networks Bristol, UK
Junior Software Engineer (industrial placement)

Environment testing for an internal project-management tool, with Node.js and Watir.

Education Bachelor's in Web Design, University of the West of England, 2011–2014. Industrial placement at Nokia Siemens Networks 2012–2013.