About

I'm Will, a software engineer based in London and the CTO at Flowstate. We're building real-time workforce modelling for engineering teams – giving engineering and finance leaders the data they need without drowning in spreadsheets.

I've spent 12+ years building products across real estate, automotive AI, enterprise and B2C platforms. My time at large corporates like SEEK and Coles Group showed me firsthand the challenges of building at scale and just how hard managing large engineering teams can be. I've balanced that with deep startup experience, from leading authentication at Linktree to growing the product team at Blinq. At Blinq, I got to solve genuinely fun problems – building a graph database to map personal connections, hunting down obscure carrier bugs affecting US customers, that sort of thing. My early interest in cyber security turned out to be surprisingly useful for debugging production mysteries across nearly every role since.

What drew me to Pactio next was the absurdity of building infrastructure for private equity shops – complex problem space, high stakes, zero margin for error. Then I wanted to tackle something even harder: products that handle ambiguous and emotional data well. So I built Jamie at Pragmatic, an AI assistant that taught me more about where AI actually creates value versus where it's just expensive pattern matching with excellent PR.

I dropped out of QUT in Brisbane to join a doomed real estate startup. That was attempt number two at real estate, actually – both failed. Turns out I'm a sucker for hard problems and long odds. The failures are both fun and deeply not fun, but they teach you things success never does.

Based in London, working globally. Always happy to chat about AI/ML, product engineering, sailing, skiing, good wine, or why Australian coffee is objectively superior. And yes, I'm the software engineer Will Hackett, not the soap opera character – Google still hasn't figured that out.