About
I started in QA. Not writing features — breaking them. My job was to find the things everyone else missed before they shipped. You develop a habit of asking “what could go wrong?” before anything happens. That habit never left me.
When I moved into engineering leadership, I brought it with me. Instead of testing code, I started applying it to teams: where are the gaps in how we work? What's the failure mode nobody's named yet? What are we going to regret in six months if we don't say something now?
I'll be straight with you — I still sometimes feel like I have no business being in a room full of engineers. I'm not one of them, and I've never pretended to be. But I've come to see that as useful. It means I hire people who are better than me at the actual craft, I rely on them, and I get out of their way. Delegation isn't a management technique for me — it's a survival instinct that happens to produce good results.
“There's no greater success for me than watching someone I've worked with grow into something they didn't think they could be.”
I'm a Senior Engineering Manager at CallRail, leading teams building analytics and communication products. Before that, I've run engineering and QA organisations across different domains and company sizes — always with the same approach: be clear about what matters, give people room to do their best work, and say the thing that needs to be said.
How I Lead
- People are the product. The feature you shipped last sprint is going to change. The team you built is going to outlast it. Everything else is a distraction from that.
- Quality starts before the code. If you're finding bugs after you've shipped, you've already lost. The same goes for teams — the conflicts, the bottlenecks, the misalignment. Most of them were preventable. Say the thing early.
- The Goldilocks process. Too little process is chaos. Too much is just management covering its own ass. The right amount gives people clarity without treating them like they can't think for themselves.
- If you rest, you rust. I read, I ask questions, I try to be better than I was last quarter. I hold my teams to the same expectation — not because growth is a KPI, but because stagnation is contagious.
Work
| 2023 — Present | CallRail Senior Engineering Managercurrent Leading engineering teams building call analytics and conversation intelligence products for marketers. Focused on growing a high-performing team across a distributed organisation while navigating rapid product growth. People DevelopmentDistributed TeamsAnalytics |
| Update me | Previous Role Engineering Manager Add your previous role details here — company, what the team built, your impact, and what you're most proud of from that chapter. Add tags |
| Update me | Previous Role QA Lead / Engineering Manager Add your earlier role here. The transition from QA into engineering leadership is a story worth telling — don't skip it. Add tags |
Beyond Work
🍺 Homebrewing IPAs
Brewing beer and building software have more in common than you'd think — both require patience, process, and a willingness to let things ferment. I've been homebrewing for years and still haven't made a bad batch I wasn't proud of.
🚲 Building bikes
There's something satisfying about understanding a system by taking it apart. I build and maintain bikes from the ground up. It's a different kind of debugging — but the satisfaction of a clean fix is the same.
🧩 Brain games & puzzles
Crosswords, logic puzzles, strategy games. I love problems that have a clean answer — it's a good counterbalance to the messy, ambiguous problems of leadership. Ask me about my fastest crossword time.
Seamas is pronounced “Shay-mus”. You were going to ask.
Contact
I don't do long email chains.
If something here resonates — or you think I've got it wrong — get in touch. I'm direct, I respond quickly, and I won't waste your time.