Richard Coombes

VP Technology @Equals

London, GB

As VP Technology at Equals Group I lead engineering and platform strategy, building cloud native, secure payments infrastructure that scales. I hire and coach senior engineering leaders, create the structures and processes that let teams ship dependable software, and focus relentlessly on reducing operational risk while enabling the business to move faster.I grew the engineering organisation from a 15 person team working on a Perl monolith to a modern, cloud native JS/C# team of 125. I took the company through the sale and merger with Railsr under new ownership, preserving delivery momentum, retaining critical capabilities, and protecting operational resilience throughout the transition.My work sits at the intersection of platform engineering, product delivery, and operational excellence. I partner with product, operations, risk, and finance to translate business needs into technical roadmaps, prioritise outcomes over outputs, and deliver repeatable, auditable systems that meet security and compliance requirements.I lead practical transformation through AI, machine learning, and automation. I run programmes to remove manual, repetitive work across functions, deploy ML where it materially improves accuracy or efficiency, and make every change observable and auditable so risk is addressed from day one.Core responsibilities:• Define and execute platform strategy, cloud native architecture, API design, and operational tooling.• Recruit, develop, and retain high performance engineering teams and leaders.• Scale engineering practices and modernise the tech stack from legacy monolith to resilient microservices.• Drive pragmatic AI and automation to cut cost, reduce error, and speed decision making.• Own reliability, security, and compliance for payments infrastructure.

City St George’s, University of London

2:1 in BSc Business Computing Systems