Integrity
Straight answers, including the unwelcome ones. If a project is the wrong idea, or you need less of us than you thought, we will tell you.
About
Deliberately small. Uncomfortably experienced.
Let Them Eat Code exists because good technical judgement is hard to buy. Big consultancies sell you a brand and staff you with whoever is on the bench. We sell you the person who will actually do the work.
Our mission
Help startups and SMEs execute on their vision
Our mission is to empower startups and SMEs to execute on their vision through well-chosen technology and expert guidance — harnessing what technology can genuinely do to drive innovation, improve operational efficiency and support sustainable growth.
In practice that means being useful rather than impressive. A great deal of technology spending is wasted on solutions to problems the business did not have, or on rebuilding something that was working adequately. We would rather find the two or three changes that move the needle and do those properly.
We aim to be a long-term partner rather than a vendor. That means being straightforward about what we are good at, honest about what we are not, and comfortable telling you when the right answer is to do nothing at all.
- 25+Years designing and shipping production systems
- 3Continents delivered across — AU, UK, UAE
- 18Largest engineering team led directly
- 30+Legacy systems decommissioned in one consolidation
Who you will work with
Matt Wood
Founder & Principal Architect
25+ years designing and delivering technical solutions across financial services, eCommerce and internet businesses — from two-person startups to firms managing tens of billions.
The specialism is large-scale distributed systems where reliability, security, low latency and fault tolerance are genuine requirements rather than nice-to-haves. That tends to mean systems that move money, hold positions, or answer to a regulator: places where a subtle bug is not a cosmetic issue.
Alongside the deep technical work there is a lot of translation — sitting between business stakeholders and engineers, turning strategy into something buildable, and explaining trade-offs to boards, investors, auditors and regulators without either patronising them or hiding behind jargon.
Most of the last decade has been consulting: coming into a business, understanding its constraints quickly, and either building the thing or helping the team become capable of building it themselves.
Track record
Where the experience comes from
Described by sector and scale rather than by name — see the note at the end of this section.
Senior Systems Architect (consultant)
Designed and built a next-generation data, research and analytics platform giving portfolio managers, quants and analysts a unified real-time view across in-house systems and external vendor feeds. Event-driven ingestion, a workflow engine producing risk and performance attribution analytics, and the dashboards the investment team runs on.
Head of Technology (consultant)
Owned overall technology strategy, led the engineering team and built the cloud platform. Deep CRM integrations for data extraction, validation and enrichment, a machine-learning propensity model built with data scientists, and an AWS workload automation platform whose dynamic resource allocation drove substantial cost savings.
Solution Architect (consultant)
Designed and led implementation of a converged crypto and fiat transaction processing platform, integrating blockchain wallets and payment gateways with back-office and reconciliation systems behind a single risk and reporting interface. Built custody wallet adapters across several chains, and automated infrastructure and security deployments.
Group Architect (consultant)
Led the technical delivery team for a new MTF. Engineered highly available, fault-tolerant secure cloud infrastructure with automated BCP/DR, built the central client and transaction data store with regulatory and internal reporting, and represented the firm at regulator technology governance sessions.
Solutions Architect
Delivered a digital asset issuance, trading, custody and settlement platform, including a distributed ledger as the system of record for trade capture, cash and asset movements and corporate actions, plus a KYC/AML onboarding platform built on a BPMN workflow engine.
Chief Systems Architect
Responsible for product, infrastructure and platform development of a regulator-approved exchange and custodial solution. Distributed microservice architecture, API gateway, multi-layered security, and a deployment pipeline that made continuous shipping safe.
Trading Systems Architect
Aligned front-office systems across multiple business units onto a common platform, reducing transaction costs and centralising execution. Designed the infrastructure, messaging and data model for an award-winning firm-wide real-time MiFID II trade repository, and worked with the FIX Trading Community on industry-level solutions.
Head of Trading & Research Technology
Led a modernisation programme delivering a new global front-office platform while keeping legacy systems serving traders throughout. Managed a team of 18 engineers and DevOps staff, built staged order-routing rollouts, and implemented real-time market data and pricing infrastructure.
Senior Developer, Risk & Operations
Extended the in-house investment management platform and rolled it out across the group, enabling the decommissioning of more than 30 existing systems and removing the reconciliation burden between them. Built real-time position management and PnL aggregation to desktop, web and mobile.
Senior .NET Developer
Led the web team, then joined the strategic development team building an enterprise-wide trading platform: client authentication, order and trade processing, price streaming, real-time margin management, and an enterprise payment gateway for account funding.
On client names
We do not publish client names without asking them first, so this page describes engagements by sector and scale instead. If you would like specifics — including references you can speak to directly — just ask during a conversation and we will arrange it with the client's agreement.
Core values
What you can hold us to
Collaboration
We work inside your team, not adjacent to it. Your engineers should finish the engagement more capable than they started it.
Excellence
Pragmatic, not precious. We build the simplest thing that survives contact with real load, real money and real auditors.
say hello
Want to know if we are a fit?
Thirty minutes, no deck, no obligation. Bring the problem you have been putting off and we will give you our honest read on it.