Michael Cutler

Early Every Time

Career Experience

Executive Director, Operating Lead for AI — SC Ventures by Standard Chartered

Singapore · 2024 – present

I run the AI Lab across SC Ventures' portfolio of companies — hands-on from first prototype to scaled deployment, inside a global bank's risk and compliance perimeter. The job is the full lifecycle: evaluate frontier capabilities early, build the proof myself, then carry it through architecture review, security, and regulation into production.

• Lead AI strategy and deployment across the venture portfolio, bridging frontier research with what a regulated financial institution can actually run — from early discovery to scaled rollout.
• Technical lead for Qatalyst, which turns sustainability reports into investment insights with AI, and for an upcoming venture with UBS that moves regulatory compliance from reactive checking to proactive risk intelligence.
• Work directly with leading AI vendors and research teams for early access to nascent capabilities, translating them into deployable products months before general availability.

Fractional CTO — KPMG Singapore, Digital Village

Singapore · 2018 – 2024

Six years as the engineer-architect embedded with enterprise clients across APAC — the forward-deployed role before it had a name. Inside a Big Four venture studio I scoped, built, and shipped emerging-technology products directly into client environments: AI, Web3, and institutional blockchain, with generative AI from its earliest usable days.

• Built and shipped KPMG Unify, a customer engagement platform deployed across multiple clients and cloud environments, reaching millions of end customers — then kept it running in production.
• Took a stream of ventures from whiteboard to working product — including "Project Sun" — across real-world asset tokenization, payments, digital identity, supply chain, and embedded finance and insurance.
• Enterprise Architect for multiple clients: designed and reviewed high-availability architectures across AWS, Azure, and GCP, and led the live migration of production workloads from Azure to AWS.
• Embedded with client IT teams as advisor and mentor — cloud architecture, site reliability, cybersecurity — so capability stayed with the client after the engagement ended.
• Built and ran a blended onshore/offshore delivery team executing multiple concurrent projects across APAC.
• Active in the startup ecosystem throughout: speaker at industry and academic events, mentor and technical advisor to early-stage teams.

Enterprise Architect, Lead Consultant — Her Majesty's Government

London, UK · 2016 – 2018

Drove a cloud-first transformation inside the UK Government as a hands-on architect: I wrote infrastructure code, ran the team, and shipped the platforms.

• Led the on-premises-to-AWS transition and established the Infrastructure-as-Code framework; co-led a 12-engineer DevOps "Tiger Team" owning every environment.
• Designed a zero-downtime blue/green deployment strategy with live data synchronization — instant environment switches, no user-visible releases.
• Automated full Apache Hadoop/HBase/Kafka/Spark environments with IaC and Ansible (with Hortonworks) — entire big-data platforms reproducible in minutes.
• Built machine-learning and analytics pipelines in Kafka/Spark (Python) powering new applications for multiple government departments.
• Wrote the automation that shut down non-production environments out of hours, cutting substantial cost; the programme won several industry awards for modernizing government e-services.

Technical Cofounder, CTO — Poseidon

London, UK · 2017 – 2018

Built a carbon-credit tokenization platform on the Stellar blockchain connecting carbon buyers and sellers, integrated into retail point-of-sale — culminating in a successful token sale (ICO).

• Tokenized Verified Carbon Units from conservation projects as NFTs — in 2017, before the term existed — with retirement handled against the Verra and Gold Standard registries.
• Shipped the retail POS integration and piloted it with Ben & Jerry's (Unilever) in London: every ice cream sold triggered a carbon-offset transaction on-chain.
• Extended to EU e-commerce, where offering a sustainability option at checkout lifted sales 26% in controlled tests.

Technical Cofounder, CTO — TUMRA

London, UK · 2012 – 2015

Left a stable career to cofound a Data-Science-as-a-Service startup: a low-code platform that aggregated diverse datasets, trained machine-learning models, and served real-time predictions — years before "MLOps" was a category.

• Spotify: mobile-app behavioral analysis driving significant lifts in premium conversions through personalized marketing.
• Intel: an interactive in-store product recommendation system in Berlin — the "retail store of the future".
• MADE.com: AI-driven merchandising and personalization, with controlled multivariate tests showing marked conversion improvements.
• DigitasLBi (Publicis Groupe): word2vec and t-SNE over social media data to build sociographic consumer profiles — production deep-learning NLP in 2013.

Additional Experience

Chief Data Scientist — Stealth Travel Startup

London, UK / Shanghai · 2015

• Early employee at a VC-funded startup; built the data collection, measurement, analytics, and reporting stack from scratch. Departed after 11 months when the company pivoted to the China market.

Senior R&D Engineer — British Sky Broadcasting (Sky)

London, UK · 2006 – 2012

• Built Sky's future products in the R&D lab: machine learning over terabytes of set-top-box and CDN data for behavioral analysis and fraud detection, academic research partnerships, and concept pitches to CXO level. Generated IP and secured several patents.

Software Engineer — British Sky Broadcasting (Sky)

London, UK · 1998 – 2006

• Core engineer on Sky Interactive and the next-generation "Darwin" set-top boxes; built a secure encryption system for UK banks and connected applications for millions of living-room devices.

Technical Proficiencies

• AI engineering: frontier LLM platforms (Anthropic, OpenAI, AWS Bedrock), agentic systems and multi-agent pipelines, RAG, evaluation and deployment in regulated environments
• Cloud platforms & tooling: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Terraform
• Distributed ledger: Hyperledger, Corda, EVM; Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Avalanche, Stellar
• Data & streaming: Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, HBase, Cassandra, Neo4j
• Containerization: Docker, Kubernetes
• Languages: Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, Rust, Go, Solidity, C/C++, C# & .NET, Scala, Java, R

Fun Facts

• During COVID I mastered additive manufacturing, 3D-printing thousands of PPE masks for Singapore's hospitals — covered by CNA — and then opened a store supplying 3D-printing materials to local schools and businesses.
• I've performed in brass bands and orchestras at Scottish, National, and European title level, including the 1996 International Music Festival in Sydney — with shows at the Opera House and City Hall.
• College dropout: I left my astrophysics degree for a small London startup that was acquired in the 2001 dot-com boom. Being early has been the through-line ever since.