About

Hi, I’m Owen. Lovely to meet you.

This is the long version. It contains two passports, one football club I can’t quit, and Hugh Jackman. Also some software.

Tip: tap the little numbers. That’s where I keep the asides.

Now

Updated October 2026

Day job: Software Engineer II at CoStar Group
Building: FieldDay, toward its Phase 1 target of Dec 31, 2026
Studying: Machine learning at Georgia Tech, part-time
Learning: Solana and Ethereum, from the payments-and-ledgers side, and writing it up as I go
On repeat: Musicals. Obviously.

Origin story

English dad, American mum, so I came with two passports pre-installed. I grew up in England, then moved to the States, and now live in Richmond, Virginia: close enough to the coast to chase a swell, far enough that I have to really want it.

I did computer science at UVA (3.92 GPA, plus an Engineering Business minor, in case anyone needed a spreadsheet), and I’m now doing a master’s in machine learning at Georgia Tech, part-time, because apparently I don’t like free evenings.

Effort over experience

I’m early in my career. I’m also not great at going half speed.

I joined CoStar Group as an Associate Software Engineer and got promoted twice in three years. Along the way I rebuilt the AI platform backend around declarative agents, so new agents ship faster on 75% less code. I built RAG agents on AWS Bedrock across 26 production OpenSearch indices, and shipped the event-driven pipelines behind the $1B Homes.com launch. Then I went home and built FieldDay. Solo. On weekends.

When I don’t know something, I don’t bluff. I go and read the docs, the source, and that GitHub issue from 2019 with 400 thumbs-up, and then I come back and explain it to whoever’s next so they don’t have to.

On teams

Anyone can make a room quieter. I’d rather make it braver.

My job on a team, as I see it: hype people up, give the credit away, and ask the “dumb” question first so the new person doesn’t have to. Knocking people down to look clever is the easiest trick in engineering, and the most useless.

I learned this at UVA. As Head TA for Database Systems I had 100+ students and helped get 10+ class projects deployed. I also led Madison House’s community-garden program, where student volunteers logged about 2,000 hours a year. Turns out leading engineers and leading people holding trowels is the same job: make it fun, make it clear, and say thank you a lot.

Why I build

Your phone is not your friend. Your tools should be.

A lot of software is built to keep you scrolling. I want to build the opposite: tools that handle the busywork in seconds and then shove you back out the door, to the trail, the pitch, the fire, your people. If you came for one thing and left an hour later, I built it wrong. Please send a bug report.

At work that means caring about the parts of AI nobody demos: retrieval, evals, cost, latency, and the pipelines that stop a feature hallucinating in staging. The model is usually the easy bit. The plumbing is where the job is.

Off the clock

In the water: surfing and kitesurfing in Virginia Beach, plus swimming. On land: running most days, and cycling. I’ve been hit by a car three times on a bike. The cars lead 3–0, but it’s a long season and I’m still turning up.

After dark: camping, always with a fire, which is the best meeting room ever invented. No slides, no phones, and the only action item is more marshmallows.

On match days: Manchester United. Always with hope, occasionally with evidence. It’s taught me more about resilience under sustained failure than any incident review.

While I work: musicals. My Spotify Wrapped has, in past years, listed Hugh Jackman and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson among my top artists.

At home: sourdough, kombucha, a garden (vegetables, fruit, herbs and flowers), and a house I’m fixing up one room at a time. I also pack care packages with the Salvation Army at Christmas, and over-think pour-over coffee.

Stories I got from my dad

Attitude and action.

The quarter-life crisis
In his mid-20s my dad left England for Australia. He still calls it his quarter-life crisis, and he tells it like the best decision he ever made. Most people book a holiday. He changed hemispheres.
Two things you can control
His rule, delivered at every opportunity: there are two things in life you can control, your attitude and your action. How you react, and what you do next. Everything else is weather.
The Energizer Bunny
He is a doer with unlimited energy and positivity, and people have compared him to the Energizer Bunny for as long as I can remember. He keeps going, and somehow he's cheerful about it.

Did it stick?

Mostly. I left my house a quarter painted for over a year because I wasn't sure I was painting it right, or whether the paint would fade. That's attitude without action.

Then there was the dryer vent. It needed a hole through the brick, so I took a hammer and chisel to the wall by hand. That's action without a plan, and it worked. My dad would call that a win on both counts.

I'm also a guy who loves his brothers. That one needs its own section.

Off the clock

Away from the keyboard.

The rest of the day: salt water, trails, campfire smoke, sawdust, flour and a fridge full of kombucha. Keep scrolling.

Kiting on a grey, windy day.

Surf & kite

Water

Virginia Beach is home water: surfing, and kiting when the wind comes up.

A first-person view down the handlebars of a scuffed red road bike over asphalt, one hand on the bars.

Exhibit A: a bike that has seen some crashes.

Run, swim, ride

Daily

Running most days, trails when I can, plus swimming and riding. As you can see, I need a new bike, given all the crashes this one has been in.

A grey and orange tent pitched on a sand dune at the coast under a blue sky.

Camp on the dunes.

Camp & fire

Outside

Hiking, camping and backpacking. Tent on the dunes, fire after dark, no slides.

Gardening

Garden

Vegetables, fruit, herbs and flowers. At UVA I led the Madison House community-garden program.

Day one: keys, and a SOLD sign.

Home renovation

House

A whole-house fixer-upper, one room at a time. Tap through for before, now and the mess in between.

Dust mask on, overalls on.

Woodwork

Shop

Home projects, mostly with hand tools. The grin is what happens when I finally get a free day for a real one.

Three swing-top glass bottles of homemade kombucha in a fridge, in deep red and amber.

A fridge shelf of my kombucha.

Baking & brewing

Kitchen

Sourdough and other bread, and kombucha brewed in swing-top bottles.

My dog

Marlow.

She came along for the beach days, the cliff walks and the kite trips, and she was happiest outside with a view. She passed in September 2026, and it’s quieter without her.

Checking out the coast.
Full speed through the shallows.
Up on the hill, taking it all in.
A view worth the walk.

A pint of Guinness with a creamy head on a wooden table, poured in her memory.

For Marlow

Thank you for every walk.

In September 2026 I poured a pint of Guinness out for her. Good girl, Marlow.

How I work

Build people up. Loudly.
Credit goes to the team, in public. Feedback goes in private, and it’s specific and kind. The newest person’s question gets the same respect as the most senior person’s.
Numbers over adjectives.
I’d rather a case study say “p95 from 1.8s → 420ms” than “blazing fast.” If I can’t measure it, I’m guessing, and you should be suspicious.
Evals before vibes.
On the /ask agent, tuning the prompt by feel got me about 70% of the way. The golden set I finally wrote found three regressions in an hour, including one where the agent had quietly started preferring my blog posts over my case studies. Flattering. Wrong.
Write it down.
Most projects I’ve shipped have a postmortem or a design doc. Writing it is how I find the holes, and it saves the next person a week.

What I’m looking for

A team that ships real things, laughs at standup, and would rather teach than gatekeep.

Open to full-stack & AI engineering roles · Remote / Hybrid / Relocation. Full-stack, AI and forward-deployed work: sitting between a model and the people who depend on it, and taking AI from a cool demo to something that holds up on a Monday morning. Bonus points for a written-down culture and at least one other person who’ll admit to liking musicals.

Go on, say hello →