Joanna Watts

S

Co-founder & COO, Opal Finance - developer tools · product · open source

Opal Finance
London, UK · GMT (UTC+0)
12+ years experience
University of Southampton
English
Co-founder
Messaging unavailable

Overview

Co-founder & COO of Opal Finance, working on developer tooling. Raised $26 million across 3 rounds. Signed 81 paying customers, 11 of them enterprises. Before that: EY and Intercom. Volunteer coding coach for school students.

Good reasons to reach out
  • People who want to build this with me
  • Thoughtful intros to people in my field
Please don't message about
  • Unpaid work or spec projects
  • Offshore staffing offers

Answers in batches on Fridays

Skills
developer toolsproductcommunityopen sourceRust
Co-founderLooking for a co-founder
closes in 3 months

Looking for an operations co-founder for inventory forecasting for law firms

The idea
Looking for an operations co-founder for inventory forecasting for law firms
Stage
Customer interviews
I bring
11 years in developer tooling
Looking for
Product-minded engineer
Commitment
Part-time to start
Location
London or remote

I bring 21 years of developer tooling (currently Opal Finance). Ideally you've built ML systems in production. Have a working prototype and design partners.

London, UK · remote OKrustcommunitydeveloper tools
Open

Experience

  1. Co-founder & COO
    Apr 2023 - Present
    Opal Finance · 3 yr 6 mo · Full-time · London, UK
    • Previously built and sold a small developer tooling company.
    • Took Opal Finance from zero to $11 million ARR.
    • Raised $6 million across 2 rounds.
  2. Director of Engineering
    Sep 2021 - Apr 2023
    EY · 1 yr 7 mo · Full-time · London, UK
    • Shipped a rewrite that took build times from 40 minutes to under 5.
  3. Senior Engineering Manager
    Mar 2018 - Sep 2021
    Intercom · 3 yr 6 mo · Full-time · London, UK
    • Reduced cloud spend on storage by 30% in two quarters.
  4. Staff Frontend Engineer
    Sep 2016 - Mar 2018
    Ryanair · 1 yr 6 mo · Full-time · London, UK
    • Shipped 29 launches on the storage team without a rollback.
  5. Principal Engineer
    Aug 2014 - Sep 2016
    ASOS · 2 yr 1 mo · Full-time · London, UK
    • Previously an operator for 11 years before investing.
    • Backed 39 founders at pre-seed and seed.

Projects

Write-up: developer tooling in practice
2026

A long-form guide to developer tooling for people starting out.

References

No references yet.

Education

  1. University of Southampton
    MEng, Engineering
    2005 - 2007
  2. University of Bristol
    BSc, Engineering
    2001 - 2004

Details

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