Finley Hill

S

CTO at Orbit Labs | ex-Intercom

Orbit Labs
Edinburgh, UK · GMT (UTC+0)
13+ years experience
University of Manchester
English
Advising
Messaging unavailable

Overview

Based in Edinburgh. I lead search and ranking at Orbit Labs. Built the experimentation framework 22 product teams use to ship changes safely. Shipped 16 launches on the search team without a rollback. Before that: Intercom and Accenture. Most at home with Python and Java.

Good reasons to reach out
  • Advice on search and ranking
  • Speaking or podcast invitations
Please don't message about
  • Courses and coaching offers
  • Generic networking requests
  • Agency or outsourcing pitches

Usually replies within a day

Skills
A/B testingJavaPythonScalalearning to rankcloud securityElasticsearch
AdvisingOpen to advising
closes in 3 months

Office hours for teams scaling past 50 engineers: search and ranking and cloud security

Topics
search and ranking, learning to rank, Elasticsearch
Format
Async reviews
Terms
Open to discuss
Capacity
One call a month
Best for
First-time founders

26 years of search and ranking. One call a month or async reviews.

Edinburgh, UKscalaa/b testingelasticsearch
Open

Experience

  1. CTO
    Jan 2025 - Present
    Orbit Labs · 1 yr 9 mo · Full-time · Edinburgh, UK
    • Cut p99 latency on the search services from 519ms to 54ms.
    • Built the experimentation framework 31 product teams use to ship changes safely.
    • Shipped a rewrite that took build times from 41 minutes to under 3.
  2. Engineering Manager
    Dec 2021 - Nov 2024
    Intercom · 2 yr 11 mo · Full-time · Edinburgh, UK
    • Wrote the Elasticsearch service that now handles 3 million requests a day.
  3. Senior Engineering Manager
    Aug 2018 - Aug 2021
    Accenture · 3 yr · Full-time · Edinburgh, UK
    • Cut p99 latency on the search services from 569ms to 95ms.
  4. Director of Engineering
    Oct 2016 - Aug 2018
    Lloyds Banking Group · 1 yr 10 mo · Full-time · Edinburgh, UK
    • Built the experimentation framework 31 product teams use to ship changes safely.
  5. Director of Engineering
    Sep 2013 - Oct 2016
    Deloitte · 3 yr 1 mo · Full-time · Edinburgh, UK
    • Grew the search team from 3 to 13 engineers.

Projects

Search and ranking benchmark
2025

Reproducible benchmarks comparing cloud security and Scala on real workloads.

Side project: a budgeting app
2024

Built with Elasticsearch and A/B testing. 4197 people used it last year.

References

No references yet.

Education

  1. University of Manchester
    BSc, Electrical Engineering
    1996 - 1999

Details

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