Technical Director, Sydney, Australia

Gerard
Beckerleg

I bridge the gap between technology and the people who use it, translating complex systems into clear decisions, turning ambiguous needs into well-specified solutions, and building teams that stay.

6+ Years as Technical Director
45+ Person distributed team
3 Countries: AU, PH, CO
8yr Longest client relationship
Get in touch LinkedIn
What I do

Core Capabilities

Technical Translation

I operate fluently between technical and non-technical worlds. When developers and stakeholders cannot understand each other, I get called in. Both sides feel understood when I am in the room, a skill that directly affects project outcomes and client relationships.

Solution Architecture

I think upstream. Rather than solving the problem in front of me, I look for the root cause. Fixing it at source makes everything downstream simpler and cheaper. I consistently steer solutions towards the least complex version that genuinely meets the need.

DXP & Platform Expertise

Deep hands-on experience across Optimizely DXP, Adobe Experience Manager and Drupal at enterprise scale. Not surface-level, but complex multi-system integrations including CDPs, open banking, marketing automation and bespoke ecommerce. Optimizely award winner.

Team Building & Leadership

I have grown a development team from 10 to 45 people across Sydney, the Philippines and Colombia. Multiple team members have 6-9 year tenures in an industry where two years is normal. That retention rate is not accidental. It reflects a deliberate approach to psychological safety and development.

Discovery & Specification

I lead the technical side of the discovery process, from initial ballpark through workshops, UX validation, integration mapping and full specification. I ask why before asking what, which consistently produces simpler and more buildable outcomes than the original brief.

Project Rescue & Stabilisation

I walk into broken situations, assess quickly and create a plan. I have stabilised failing projects for major clients across automotive, financial services and telecoms, in several cases turning an unhappy client on the verge of leaving into a long-term relationship.

Selected Work

Projects & Platforms

Hyundai Australia Automotive

Eight-Year Digital Ecosystem

Relationship began as a project rescue of a failing CMS with regular outages and a stuck backlog. Over eight years, grew into an embedded team of 14 people delivering and maintaining an interconnected digital ecosystem: brand site, owner portal, D2C ecommerce, product information management, retail pricing, and Genesis brand, all deeply integrated with Hyundai's enterprise systems.

AEM Adobe Cloud Java Spring Boot Keycloak DMS Integration
Highest-revenue client relationship, sustained over eight years
Hyundai Australia Automotive · Ecommerce

Direct-to-Consumer Vehicle Sales Platform

Fully bespoke ecommerce platform enabling direct-to-consumer vehicle sales, bypassing dealerships entirely. Built by a team of four in three months. Every stage of the purchase journey (stock check, quote, contract, payment) fully automated with zero manual involvement, deeply integrated with the Dealer Management System. Post-launch, designed and ran load testing using a man-in-the-middle proxy to simulate API failures and verify graceful degradation. Subsequently productised as a white-label platform for Genesis.

Bespoke Ecommerce DMS Integration Load Testing White-Label
Sold out initial launch allocation on day one. Rebuilt as Genesis platform.
Tourism Tasmania Tourism · Government

Optimizely DXP Platform

Multi-site digital experience platform built on Optimizely DXP. Includes Optimizely Data Platform CDP-driven personalisation, machine learning content recommendations, ATDW integration for operator content as a single source of truth, Okta SSO across website and mobile app, Mailchimp personalised email via CDP, and a Flutter mobile application. Involved in the pitch that won the account.

Optimizely DXP ODP / CDP Okta SSO Flutter ATDW
Pitch win. Multi-year ongoing relationship.
Beyond Bank Australia Financial Services

Optimizely DXP Platform

Award-winning Optimizely DXP implementation for a customer-owned bank. Open banking integration delivers live product data including interest rates directly from the bank's systems. Machine learning content recommendations serve relevant content based on user behaviour. Navigated a formal Architectural Review Board process to achieve enterprise sign-off before build.

Optimizely DXP Open Banking Content Recommendations ARB
Optimizely Partner Award winner.
Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceutical

Global Drupal Platform & HCP Engagement

Onboarded Orchard into BI's global Drupal platform, requiring the agency to build PHP capability from scratch to retain the client. Implemented the full Adobe suite including Campaign, Target and Analytics. Built a one-time deep linking system allowing HCPs to access restricted content from campaign emails without re-authenticating, measurably increasing content engagement. Also implemented weather-based dynamic email personalisation at postcode level.

Drupal Adobe Campaign Adobe Target HCP Engagement Deep Linking
Retained major client. Established PHP and Adobe practice.
BPAY Group Financial Services · Payments

BPAY, OSKO & Biller Ecosystem

Three-workstream engagement covering the BPAY and OSKO website rebuild on Kentico, a developer API documentation site, and a secured SharePoint biller portal. Navigated stringent Enterprise Architecture approval processes with the BPAY EA team. Registered Orchard as a Kentico partner and oversaw developer certification to win the work from the incumbent agency.

Kentico SharePoint Enterprise Architecture API Documentation
Won work from incumbent through partnership and technical credibility.
Clear Skincare Health & Beauty · Ecommerce

Shopify Platform Consolidation

Consolidated four separate websites across Australia and New Zealand (two WordPress and two Shopify) into a single redesigned Shopify platform. Reviewed UX designs against Shopify's capabilities, built team capacity in the platform (new to Orchard), wrote the full specification and oversaw delivery. Launched without issues.

Shopify Multi-market UX Validation
30% uplift in sales following launch.
Internal R&D Healthcare · AI

Endometriosis Diagnostic AI

Fine-tuned an OpenAI language model on a labelled dataset of patient pain descriptions, categorised by a subject matter expert, to identify symptom patterns indicative of endometriosis. Integrated into a conversational web interface for patient-facing use. Validated against a held-out test set. Adoption was prevented by legal and liability constraints around AI in medical diagnosis, which the team identified and navigated honestly.

OpenAI Fine-Tuning Supervised Learning Healthcare AI
POC complete. Demonstrates practical AI fine-tuning capability.
Technical Profile

Technologies & Platforms

DXP & CMS Platforms

  • Optimizely DXP
  • Optimizely Commerce
  • Adobe Experience Manager
  • Adobe Cloud
  • Drupal
  • Umbraco / Umbraco Commerce
  • Kentico
  • WordPress
  • Shopify

Languages & Frameworks

  • .NET / C#
  • Java / Java Spring Boot
  • PHP / Laravel
  • JavaScript / TypeScript
  • Python
  • Flutter (architecture level)
  • MVC / Web API / Entity Framework
  • Microservices Architecture

Marketing Technology

  • Adobe Campaign
  • Adobe Target
  • Adobe Analytics
  • Marketo
  • Salesforce Marketing Cloud
  • Optimizely Data Platform (CDP)
  • Google BigQuery (CDP)
  • HubSpot

Identity & Security

  • Okta
  • Auth0
  • Keycloak
  • ADFS / JWT / OWIN
  • Single Sign-On Architecture
  • PII Data Protection
  • Penetration Test Management

Integration & API

  • Azure API Gateway
  • REST API Architecture
  • Open Banking
  • Salesforce / Veeva
  • DMS Integration
  • ATDW
  • CRM / PIM Integration

Cloud, AI & Data

  • Azure
  • AWS
  • Adobe Cloud
  • OpenAI Fine-Tuning
  • Google BigQuery
  • D3.js Visualisation
  • CI/CD / Docker
About

The developer who grew into something harder to define

I started my career as a software developer and spent my early years at SSW, a .NET consultancy in Sydney, where I worked across a range of enterprise clients as a senior architect and Scrum Master. I also lectured in .NET and SharePoint at the University of Technology Sydney, and mentored on FireBootCamp, a nine-week full-immersion development bootcamp. Before all of that, I took a career break and taught English in Italy, where I earned my CELTA qualification. It taught me more about how to structure and communicate complex information than anything I did as a developer.

I joined Orchard as a Solution Architect and became Technical Director a few years later. What the title never quite captured was what the job actually was: keeping work flowing through the system. That sounds deceptively simple. In practice it meant being the person who could walk into any conversation, with a developer, a client, an account director, a Korean engineering team, and make everyone feel heard and understood. I have been called in to rescue failing projects, to translate what developers are trying to say, to turn a vague client request into a specification someone can actually build from, and to stand in front of a boardroom and make a technical argument that lands.

Over ten years I built the development practice from a 10-person .NET-only team to a 45-person operation spanning Sydney, the Philippines and Colombia, covering .NET, Java, PHP, and most of the major DXP platforms. I care a lot about how teams feel and not just what they produce. Several people have been with me for six, seven, eight, nine years. In an industry with notoriously high churn, I think that says more than any project outcome.