Executive remit
The role consolidates functions that are often four separate executives: data, infrastructure, security, and technology operations.
- Group data and internal technology strategy, unifying data infrastructure, governance, security, and TechOps.
- Data monetisation: new revenue streams through insights, APIs, and data products.
- Global TechOps and service desk operations across Australasia and the USA.
- Enterprise-wide information governance and security frameworks, with compliance across multiple privacy regimes.
- Self-service analytics and data-driven decision-making across the organisation.
- Multi-disciplinary teams spanning data engineering, analytics, InfoSec, and TechOps.
Blackpearl Group's portfolio spans Pearl Diver, Black Pearl Mail, New Old Stamp, Bebop AI, and B2B Rocket; my remit covers data, security, and technology operations across the group.
Production scale, in context
- 270M
- US persons covered by the intent and identity pipelines I'm responsible for in Snowflake. The figure describes platform reach, and with it the scale of the privacy and governance obligations the role carries.
- 700B+
- Tokens through a single model integration in one recent quarter: sustained production throughput on one of several products we ship, and the operational reality behind how I think about AI infrastructure.
- 3 regions
- A distributed team across New Zealand, Australia, and the USA; a small company that punches above its weight.
Shipped in the last year
Selected work, described in the terms the public record supports.
- A multi-agent AI system with enterprise-grade identity management and automated evaluation harnesses, applying the agent-identity patterns I write about to a commercial platform.
- Blackpearl Group's first datasets on the Snowflake Marketplace, turning internal data infrastructure into commercial data products.
- Security investigation and remediation scoping for an acquisition, hands-on in the acquired codebase before scoping the work with the engineers who delivered it.
- A CCPA compliance system with guaranteed delivery from day one, treating privacy obligations as an engineering requirement rather than a policy aspiration.
- The AI Agent IAM Policy: identity, credential handling, and blast-radius controls for agentic systems, now in production, and presented as part of AI governance work to the board level of a listed company.
Public references
- Blackpearl Group (BPG) on the NZX
- Pearl Diver's datasets at a glance, where the group publishes its dataset figures.
- Chris Watson on LinkedIn, the public source for role and dates.
For the systems I build and run myself, see Projects.