Principal Engineer & Product Lead — Geospatial SaaS

af@albert-fit.com · github.com/albert-fit · linkedin.com/in/albert-fit · South East England, UK (hybrid)

Profile

Hybrid engineer who single-handedly designed, built and runs a commercial geospatial SaaS platform now serving 6,000+ engineers across £5bn+ of infrastructure projects. I combine full-stack development, AWS cloud infrastructure and AI-augmented delivery with deep surveying-domain fluency that a pure software engineer can't replicate, turning raw drone and LiDAR survey data into secure, interactive products that global engineering teams depend on. I own problems end to end: from identifying the commercial need, to architecting the system, to shipping it and measuring the result.

Selected impact

• Created Portal from nothing into a core revenue driver. Sole architect and developer of The Scan Station's commercial geospatial platform. The contracts it unlocked drove the revenue growth that tripled the survey team and multiplied company EBITDA.
• Scaled to 6,000+ engineer users across £5bn+ of projects, including a UK parliamentary estate, two major oil refineries and remote oil & gas fields in southern Iraq. Several oil & gas clients now mandate the platform in their contracts.
• Cut ~20 hrs/week off the technical director's workload by automating orthophoto generation, removing a manual step previously repeated on every job.
• Saved ~56 engineer-hours/week with Python tooling that automated routine image-processing workflows (part of automation that collectively saves the team 145+ hrs/week).
• Saved ~£3,500/month in cloud storage costs through S3 lifecycle tiering and automated cold-storage transfers.
• Carried a £300k project past in-house capacity by building a cloud overflow for the photogrammetry pipeline (Windows-Docker + Reality Scan CLI on AWS) when the largest job to date outgrew the three on-premise workstations. Dormant between jobs, redeployable on demand.

Experience

The Scan Station — drone survey & inspection, UK. Joined as a surveyor in April 2021; shipped the first version of Portal in June 2022 while still surveying; the developer title followed in May 2023.

• Architected and built Portal solo: a secure, serverless web platform for viewing and distributing 3D point clouds, 360° imagery, orthophotos and live drone streaming. Stack: Next.js (JavaScript), Node.js, MongoDB, AWS Amplify + CloudFront, S3.
• Grew it from a single-client fix to a platform 6,000+ engineers rely on, now written into client contracts as a delivery requirement; the additional revenue tripled the team and multiplied EBITDA.
• Deployed on AWS Amplify with CloudFront CDN distributions; S3 lifecycle automation cutting storage spend by ~£3,500/month.
• Wrote Python automation across the survey pipeline, removing ~20 hrs/week of orthophoto work from the technical director and ~56 hrs/week of routine image processing from engineers.
• Built a Windows-Docker photogrammetry pipeline around the Reality Scan CLI, as burst capacity on AWS (memory-optimised for alignment, GPU for reconstruction), taking the overflow when a job outgrows the on-premise workstations; it carried a £300k project the in-house machines could not.
• Ran the product cycle directly with clients: gathering feedback, prioritising sprints and shipping features (confined-space drone trajectory visualiser, bespoke asset/pipeline mapping, admin and distribution tooling) that drove satisfaction and repeat contracts.
• Re-designed the MongoDB schema (migration via the Python driver) to remove anti-patterns, speed up queries on large lists and support the growing feature set.
• Mentor the junior surveyor/developer; set capture specifications for survey teams.

Domain: UAV/aerial surveying, LiDAR/HDS, photogrammetry, measured building surveys. TQUK Level 4 Commercial Drone Pilot (RQF), A2 CofC.

RSK — environmental and engineering consultancy, UK.

• Managed acoustic, vibration and structural-monitoring projects end to end, designing bespoke instrumentation and software for major UK infrastructure.
• Designed and deployed an ultrasound acoustic-emission monitoring system (edge server + telemetry) on Clifton Bridge, Nottingham, protecting the internal post-tensioning and keeping the bridge safely in service (project value £550k).
• Led vibration-mitigation testing for the Midland Metro tramline (Birmingham) and ground-stiffness / point-cloud mapping for HS2 trial embankments.
• First exposure to building real engineering systems in code: the bridge between surveying and software that became my moat.

Skills

Languages

JavaScript, Python, TypeScript (in progress)

Frontend

Next.js, React

Backend / data

Next.js API routes, Node.js, MongoDB

Cloud / infra

AWS (Amplify, CloudFront, S3, EC2, IAM, CloudTrail), Docker, Linux

Delivery

AI-augmented development, continuous deployment (AWS Amplify, dev/prod), Playwright end-to-end tests run before every push, product discovery with clients

Domain

Geospatial / reality capture, LiDAR & HDS, photogrammetry, UAV survey, point-cloud processing

Education & certification

• MongoDB Associate Developer — certified, 2023
• PG Diploma in Acoustics & Noise Control (Merit) — Institute of Acoustics, 2017–2018. Programming coursework: algorithms & data structures, Python, VBA.
• BSc (Hons) Music Technology, First Class — University of the West of Scotland, 2013–2017. Signal processing: Fourier transforms, digital synthesis, A/D conversion.
• Audio Engineering Diploma — SAE Institute, Bucharest

The hybrid edge

A pure computer-science graduate couldn't have built Portal; it took someone fluent in both the survey domain and the software. I mastered acoustics to postgraduate level, then taught myself engineering to the point of shipping a commercial platform solo. The unconventional path is the moat: domain and code in one person is rare, and it's exactly what reality-capture and geospatial products need.