news corporation
Senior Software Engineer
June 2023 – present · London · The Times, TalkSPORT, The Sun (all News UK titles) | newscorp.com
overview
Joined News UK to work on the shared ad-library serving all brands — The Times, TalkSPORT, The Sun and others. The core role is maintaining and evolving the JavaScript ad-delivery product embedded across mobile and desktop web, responsible for all programmatic and direct advertising revenue.
In addition to the engineering work, I established myself as a principal voice in the internal AI community, leading the adoption of LLM workflow orchestration, agent harnesses, and repository context management.
noteworthy achievements
- Video advertising implementation (full redesign) — Architecture and full implementation of new video advertising. Used targeted IMA config per video-player runtime to improve customer targeting appeal. Achieved a 64% increase in overall video revenue.
- Video advertising re-architecture — Redesigned legacy IMA video ad integration from the ground up. Decoupled Brightcove player functionality and delegated all IMA construction and auction logic to the ad-library, creating a thin client plugin, atomic per-player configs, and intelligent auctioning. Delivered a 67% increase in pre-roll advertising revenue.
- Mobile swipe re-architecture — Increased advertising revenue by £3,000 per day per brand. Audited the host platform's interaction with the ad-library's exposed methods, revealing an incompatibility when running a pseudo-SPA UI alongside cache issues with datalayer metadata. The fix: simulate page-navigation swipe, then force a reload — unlocking significant incremental revenue that had been silently lost.
- JSON5 → TypeScript migration — Migrated all product configs (Prebid adapter configs, ad-slot schemas) from JSON5 to TypeScript, eliminating human config errors (typos, schema violations) that had caused live defects. Introduced strict JSON schema validation across all adapter definitions.
- Logging and telemetry refactor — Identified that product runtime logs were being dispatched as Redux Saga messages — a significant runtime liability for memory use and execution time. Decoupled logging from state management entirely. For the telemetry counterpart, audited beacon payload schemas and introduced mandatory properties to normalise reporting against JSON schema.
- Global metadata audit (NDAP) — Audited all-brands global metadata served by three separate data layers. Consolidated data points into a constant JSON schema and refactored all advertising consumers to retrieve key/value pairs from the unified data layer (NDAP).
llm workflow orchestration & agent harnesses
Active member and presenter in the News UK internal AI community, focusing on applied AI engineering rather than theoretical concepts. Contributions include:
- All Hands Engineering (early 2025) — Presented an introduction to Vibe Coding and practical AI-assisted workflows to the full engineering organisation.
- Repository context management — Encouraging teams to use tools like NotebookLLM to automate documentation and knowledge sharing across complex codebases.
- LLM workflow orchestration — Running internal sessions on RAG implementation, agent hygiene, harness design, and auditing agent output.
- Agent harnesses — Developed "airc" (AI runtime config), a prototype workflow generator with credit/token usage reporting to standardise agentic tasks.
- Custom developer tools — Created
fzfast, an AI CLI tool for fast file-finding, designed to reduce context window pollution and token costs in agentic workflows. - Automation infrastructure — Running a self-hosted N8N node to manage programmatic pipelines and API orchestrations.