Rory Holmes

Senior Software Engineer

I specialise in scalable distributed systems. Currently building the systems that power content discovery, personalisation and recommendations at the BBC .

About

I'm a Manchester-based Senior Software Engineer, building distributed, event-driven systems, working primarily with TypeScript, AWS and Kafka — with earlier experience building .NET APIs.

My background is unconventional — I studied psychology and computational neuroscience, spent time researching bio-inspired AI, then left academia to pursue software engineering full-time. That research mindset shapes how I work: I prefer to understand systems deeply rather than just make them work.

Currently, I work at the BBC, building the distributed systems that power content discovery, personalisation and recommendations across the BBC's digital platforms.

Experience

2024 — Present

Senior Software Engineer · BBC

Promoted 04/2026

Building and maintaining scalable distributed systems for content metadata aggregation and delivery, serving over nine million pieces of content across BBC platforms. Leading cross-functional epics end-to-end, from requirements through to production deployment.

TypeScript
Scala
AWS
Kafka
GitHub Actions
Docker
SQL

2023-2024

Software Developer · Omnisis

Promoted 02/2024

Led server-side development of a greenfield web application for complex survey data visualisation and statistical analysis. Modernised legacy authentication infrastructure with OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect. Integrated OpenAI's Whisper API for automated audio transcription, reducing costs by 99.8%.

C#
.NET
SQL
TypeScript
React

2022 — 2023

Graduate ML Researcher · University of Sheffield

Doctoral research at the intersection of neuroscience, AI and autonomous robotics in collaboration with Opteran Technologies. Developed prototype models using neural network architectures including self-organising maps, attractor networks and variational autoencoders.

Python
PyTorch
Machine Learning
Computational Neuroscience

2021 — 2022

Junior Software Developer · Omnisis

Implemented an event-driven system with precomputed partial outputs, achieving up to 1000× faster file generation for critical survey reports. Performed market segmentation through dimensionality reduction, clustering and classification.