Venture
Circo
A creator-first video platform where I led a 16-person engineering team across media, intelligence, payments and apps.
Systems from Circo
System
The Circo platform
The creator-first video platform the media, intelligence and payments systems on this site belong to: native apps, web, studios and an event-driven backend.
System
Multi-DRM protection and entitlement-gated playback
Encrypt once, license per viewer: paid creator video protected across every major DRM system, where the licence decision is a business rule about who has paid. Live in production.
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Adaptive streaming and the transcoding ladder
Every upload becomes a ladder of renditions, packaged once for HLS and DASH and served from the edge, so every phone gets the best stream its connection can hold. Live in production.
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Video moderation that fails closed
A media admission pipeline that probes cheaply, gates on spec, classifies with a model, and always returns one predictable result, rejecting what it cannot inspect.
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Circo Sparks: one event model for engagement
Views, likes, shares, comments and recircos turned into a single event stream, where every action carries value for both the fan and the creator.
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Audience affinity: what should I make next?
Recommendation turned around for creators: from your audience, find the topics they watch elsewhere that you haven't made, with privacy floors in code.
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Personalised feeds on a recommendation engine
Every interaction batched into a recommendation engine, with visibility rules and session continuation so the feed stays safe and attributable.
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Payments, wallets, gifting and payouts
A payment service that keeps money, virtual gifts, subscriptions and payouts apart, and wires payment straight into who may watch.
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Leading an AI-native engineering team
Building and leading a 16-person engineering team across backend, web, mobile, ML and data, with one shared operating model for coding agents.
System
VideoSense: an AI video intelligence engine
A pipeline that watches a video the way an editor would: scenes, speech, motion and narrative in; teasers, platform-ready presets, thumbnail crops and monetisation signals out.
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Project Zeus: delivery intelligence for an engineering org
One live view across every engineering board at Circo: what is being built, by whom, how healthy delivery is, where it is stuck and how fast the team ships.