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Darren Hickling

Projects

A selection of projects I have contributed to over my career.

Years
2025–present
Role
Principal Solutions Director

Regulated insurers: Production AI

I lead the design and delivery of AI products for regulated insurers, from first workshop to production.

  • Shipped 3 production AI products
  • Extracts claims at over 97% accuracy in 16 seconds
Years
2021–2023
Role
Lead Technical Architect

NHS Digital: Population Health Platform

Co-architected and delivered a multi-award-winning, scalable and reusable national platform that created "a new way to find patients" to initially identify those potentially suitable for treatment of COVID-19.

  • Led to 114k COVID treatments
  • Notified 1.3m people with over 99.9% accuracy
  • Earned 3 awards
  • Co-created the programme behind NHS Notify's first 100m messages
Read NHS Digital's write-up → (opens in a new tab)
Population Health Platform for NHS Digital
Years
2019–2021
Role
Head of Development

Avondata: RezControl

Led a team to compose a wide range of AWS services and create comprehensive CI/CD pipelines that deployed well-tested code daily to port an established, on-premise Property Management System to AWS as a real-time, scalable SaaS platform.

  • Onboards hotels in under 5 minutes
  • Migrated 50 legacy sites in 3 months
Read Avondata's write-up → (opens in a new tab)
Years
2015–2018
Role
Senior Developer and Technical Stream Lead

Vitality: Unified brand website

Replaced three sites to unify the brand, which doubled mobile usage, increased revenue and decreased advertising costs via organic SEO growth. As Technical Stream Lead, I advised the business whilst developing a responsive and customisable site.

  • Doubled mobile usage
  • Cut advertising costs through organic search
Visit vitality.co.uk → (opens in a new tab)
Years
2014–2015
Role
Web Engineer

Spicerhaart: CMS & Property Search

Led a team to architect and develop a suite of award-nominated, responsive estate agency websites, powered by fast geospatial searches that doubled mobile engagement.

  • Doubled mobile engagement
  • Award-nominated
Visit Felicity J Lord → (opens in a new tab)
Years
2008–2014
Role
Senior Software Engineer

FactSet: Market data reporting

Initially a static, four-tile report, our small team engineered an interactive, multi-tile dashboard for a high-profile release.

  • Generated over 100m reports with zero downtime
See FactSet's market data → (opens in a new tab)
Market data reporting for FactSet

Earlier

2000–2004

GP Design · Production Management

Generated and pitched ideas to most major film industry distributors, then designed, managed and delivered the print and web promos for films including James Bond and Star Wars.