The short version of a twenty-year run from freelance design to engineering management to production machine learning. Written for the people deciding whether to hire me.
I started as a designer, taught myself to build, and spent seven years at Intuit growing a one-person web function into the APAC engineering team, finishing with the regional delivery of the company's largest product launches. Somewhere in the middle I worked out the thing that actually sets me apart: my ideas move faster than my hands. So I stopped trying to be the fastest pair of hands and started building the things that multiply them, first a team, then an agency model, now AI systems.
These days that same instinct runs my machine learning work: systems that watch the sky for undiscovered nebulae, and lately, satellites watching Earth for fire.
Twelve years as a graphic, digital and UX designer: in-house at Ingram Micro, Coverforce and Fairfax Media, a small studio of my own, freelance work for small businesses. Web development started as the side skill in those roles and quietly became the career. The lesson that stuck, though I couldn't name it yet: I could always imagine more than I could personally produce.
Joined Intuit as the only web developer for QuickBooks' emerging markets: roughly 200 countries on one shared platform, eight regional sites growing to thirteen, eventually eleven languages and six currencies. Every other regional team looked after one country. Mine looked after everyone else.
The international business grew roughly 4× in revenue and 3× in customers over five years, from loss-making to strongly profitable. That was a whole team's work, not one person's, but the web channel I ran was its cheapest acquisition path by an order of magnitude, and from 2021 I held its forecast personally, a number that usually belongs to a marketer, not an engineer. Took the region from English-only to eleven languages: proved the direction with a minimal Spanish funnel, then productionised the pipeline for nine more. Along the way I presented the personalised web experience I'd built, face to face, to Intuit co-founder Scott Cook and to Alex Chriss, now CEO of PayPal.
Promoted to Staff. Did the maths: one of me producing was worth less than one of me directing ten producers. Sourced the team's first agency partner and grew it from a $30k engagement into an embedded eight-person team, on an operating model still running four years later. Managing two engineers and carrying commercial numbers while still holding an IC title; an internal re-levelling later rated the role at Principal level on most competencies. Doubled the conversion rate of the global pricing page across the same stretch.
Engineering Manager for APAC web: QuickBooks and MailChimp, 65 countries, 14 priority markets, 70M+ annual visitors, about A$0.5M in budget. Led the regional delivery of Intuit's biggest brand overhaul in its modern history: 40,000+ lines of code, zero customer-blocking outages. Absorbed a second brand with no extra headcount by redesigning how work arrived instead of hiring, and was the first leader in the division to pilot AI-driven intake workflows; the UK and Canada teams built their own workflows from my framework.
While the day job scaled, the builder's itch kept its own hours: a deep-learning system that hunts undiscovered nebulae across nine-band survey imagery, an automated observatory pipeline, an open-source planning tool with a plugin on N.I.N.A.'s official marketplace, and Tellisto, a client-gallery SaaS for photographers. All production-grade: tests, CI, observability, real users. I also serve as president of the Northern Sydney Astronomical Society, where I build the club's software too.
Made redundant in Intuit's 2026 restructure, and spending the runway deliberately: porting the nebula-detection architecture to satellite active-fire detection, and looking for the next team to lead. AI finally closed the gap between how fast I think and how fast I can build. I want to bring that leverage to a team working on something that matters.
“Calm and craft… a testament to your leadership.”VP, APAC · on the brand-overhaul launch
“Great work on the release… excellent collaboration.”SVP, International
“You've made a major difference for us.”UK web lead · after I fixed a billing outage outside my remit
“Rohan is a superstar, especially when you consider the number of markets and teams he supports every day.”Peer feedback · from a Staff promotion case
International Impact Through Collaboration award (2025) · Stronger Together award (2022) · Learning Leader, top-5 learner internationally (2020)
From your side of the table: give me the business goal and the number, and you get a function you don't have to run. I translate direction into delivery, carry the forecast and the budget myself, and report like an owner rather than a status feed.
Inside the team, the trade is autonomy for outcomes. Engineers own the how; I own the what, the why and the risk. When someone's stuck or slipping I root-cause it early, badly briefed, overwhelmed, blocked on another team, and fix the cause rather than manage the symptom. I absorb the meeting load and the org noise so senior engineers do senior work; it's the same buffer-layer thinking that reclaimed 30–40% of my team's capacity at Intuit.
Upward, the rule is no surprises: risk gets raised while it's still cheap, and escalations arrive as a short summary with a recommended call. Disagreements are had in private and backed in public, and credit lands on whoever did the work. Teams that trust that stay together; mine did, through a restructure.
A U-Net++ segmentation system hunting undiscovered nebulae across 9-band survey imagery. 13,000 training tiles harmonised from 12+ sky surveys, experiment tracking, data versioning, CI. It has already surfaced real candidates.
The same architecture pointed at Earth: fire segmentation on the standard Landsat-8 benchmark, built as a controlled encoder bake-off on a shared evaluation harness. In progress.
A client-gallery and CRM platform for photographers. Row-level multi-tenant security, content-safety scanning, Stripe billing, 600+ automated tests. Opening its beta soon.
Turns a multi-terabyte image archive into a searchable sky map, with a companion plugin on N.I.N.A.'s official marketplace. Free, MIT-licensed, built for the community.
The ideas list has always been longer than the shipped list. That gap is the whole reason I build leverage.