Michael Cullum

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT MICHAEL CULLUM

Michael Cullum is the CTO at Bud, a late-Series B London Fintech company that produces a platform utilised by top global banks & fintechs to leverage the potential value and power of transactional data to gain a 360 understanding of customers and deliver actionable insights.Prior to leading Engineering & Data at Bud, Michael has an in-depth technical background working as an architect and software & data engineer for over a decade, working particularly with Go, PHP & Python, both commercially and being active in the open-source world. He has particular focuses and specialisms in distributed systems, data engineering, scaling and security giving him a unique perspective across the disciplines of SRE, SWE, and data engineering.He loves nothing more than being able to solve interesting and challenging problems and has a fundamental belief that software engineers are problem solvers who express their solutions through code. Michael is a strong advocate of good development practices whilst building scalable, maintainable and well-tested systems and applications but retains that when developing software pragmatism and context must also be considered. He enjoys seeing projects through to deliver measurable value and working towards a bigger strategy and vision. As a leader he believes in empowering teams to develop autonomy, independence, ownership and innovation through shared values, mentoring, honesty and trust.In his last role at SamKnows he was a lead software engineer & architect working on the storage and processing of internet measurement data at huge scale (> 100 million rps) while heading up data engineering.He frequently speaks at conferences and has spoken more than at more than 250 events spanning 4 continents doing technical, soft skill and keynote talks to audiences of 1500+ people including keynoting the largest PHP conference in the world.He is a member of Symfony Framework Core Team as Security Lead. He was also formerly part of the management team & a core developer at phpBB (used on ~25 million sites). He has also been involved in the PHP FIG previously running the administration of it as Secretary for 2 years, as editor of PSR-12 and serving a member of the Core Committee, it’s steering group. He still works with the FIG to lead efforts on collaboration on security.