Our Team

Ciarán's role as Skimlinks CTO is to lead the technical innovation for Skimlinks' products and the platform's infrastructure. Ciarán relishes this opportunity to develop technologies that enable exceptional experiences for clients and end-users of the Skimlinks technology.

Before joining Skimlinks, Ciarán worked in his native Ireland as Head of IT at one of the country's largest mobile communications companies. He has worked as a freelance developer before establishing Weeno Ltd, a web application and design company. Ciarán is currently the President of PHP London.

Ciarán also leads the team on music tastes and is often found singing the wrong words to songs, on the offbeat. He takes his lunch when everyone else in England is taking tea and enjoys falling down a mountain while attached to a snowboard.

Angus Bankes was founder and CTO of Moreover Technologies where he was recognised in the industry as a leader in the area of XML. At Moreover, Angus was one of the main advocates and driving force for the mass adoption of RSS feeds.

In 2005 Moreover Technologies was acquired by Verisign (NASD: VRSN) where Angus ran the technology for both moreover.com and weblogs.com. He has now joined the Skimlinks team to cover the area of technology strategy and architecture.

Angus gives regular talks to publishers and enterprises on such topics as the future of internet publishing, new distribution methods, social media and OpenID and enjoys forcing his colleagues to watch videos of himself appearing on 90s TV quiz shows.

Richard is another Australian import, recently moving away from sunny Brisbane to a climate more considerate to his complexion.

Previously working as Lead Developer for several years at Brightlabs, a leading Australian web agency, Richard has experience in a wide range of tech and is just as comfortable debugging browser rendering quirks as he is wiring up new servers in the data centre.

He passes the time on weekends writing open source file parsing libraries and reading books on cryptography. He also enjoys frequenting events of a live music variety as well as those of a comedic persuasion.

Joining Skimlinks to head up the platforms team, Edward came from onefinestay where he designed and built a service oriented platform to drive the expansion of the business. Prior to that he worked at WooMe, an online video startup, building scalable video and textual chat platforms for millions of online users.

Has a degree in Graphic Design from Nottingham Trent which became massively underused as he found himself gravitating more and more towards software development which he describes as being “far more creative”. Regardless, we're glad to have his interesting mix of skills on our team!

He still retains a love of design and typography, as well as various forms of electronic music which range from musique concrète to dance, his collection growing on a daily basis with each 12" record shaped parcel that arrives in the office. He has a large collection of synths and drum machines and can often be found lurking by the speakers in the depths of London's techno scene. A lover of all things wine and beer, his local London craft beer pub is a regular feature of his Foursquare check-ins.

Karol came to the UK from Katowice, Poland to be amongst the booming London tech scene. He studied at NKJO and has worked in many different aspects of front-end development.

Before coming to Skimlinks, he built web applications for cool brands like asos.com and 123-reg. On the side, Karol also consults entrepreneurs on online security.

After hours, Karol loves working on personal projects including a memorization app and a poker application. He also claims to live a double life as an opera singing student; we'll put that to the test at the next happy hour!

As our Senior Software Engineer, Tamás has built all the prettiest bits of the Skimlinks interface, as well as numerous other products with his lightning fast coding skills. He's built tools for every part of the Skimlinks operation and is the only member of the team to insist on using the Opera web browser.

Before joining the team, Tamás built various sites back in Hungary and still surprises us with incredible weekend coding projects.

Arguably, he used to have the best dreadlocks in tech, Tamás also drinks enough Redbull to win a sponsorship deal and can solve a Rubik's cube faster than anyone we know.

Imogen joined us from Cape Town, after a stint as a developer for the Amazon Web Services sector of Amazon.com.

Born in game farm country in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, Imogen loves nothing better than a dose of big sky and silence. When not hunched over a keyboard, she straps on running shoes and pretends that Hampstead Heath is on the slopes of Table Mountain - and then immediately ruins the good work by indulging her obsession for chocolate.

With degrees in Theoretical Physics and Computer Science and an (embarrassingly) encyclopaedic knowledge of all things Tolkien and Joss Whedon, Imogen's the geekiest woman she knows and proud of it. And, while her playlists do include such upbeat artists as Pearl Jam, Leonard Cohen, Nirvana and Radiohead, she's still somehow annoyingly cheerful most of the time.

Erik co-founded Atma Links, taking the technical helm as CTO, but has now joined the Skimlinks crew as a Senior Software Engineer, putting his knowledge to work on our products.

Erik was born and raised in Stockholm, Sweden, which he left in 2005 to study computer science at Stanford University. He has since moved to New York City, where he spent the last two years building the Atma technology with Chris.

Erik loves to experiment with his hair, and unleashed his sweet moustache on society after working on it in stealth under the guise of a full beard. His favourite movie is Karate Kid.

Andras is Skimlinks' second Hungarian, and joins the team following his work on Hungary's largest social networking site, iwiw.

He loves coding chatbots and his dream is to do the Turing test. He also loves nature, but more often than not, you'll find him in front of his computer or checking in on FourSquare.

The first Northern Irish member of the team, Stuart hails from Belfast with an MA in Computer Science from Queens University. Formerly working in online gambling, Stuart's current adrenaline pumping thrill is working as one of Skimlinks' talented Software Engineers. Having worked in pretty much every one of our tech teams over the years, he is now helping us to establish the foundations for our new Data products. He's keen on PHP, properly written JS and all things web development-y, so he's found a welcoming home at Skimlinks.

When not going to Chelsea matches he can be found in the pub, at a club or gig. He's of the indie/electro persuasion so will be adding a different flavour to the already eclectic office playlist. Although commuting from West London, he's keen on being introduced to the bright lights and delights of East London.

Oleksandr, or Sasha for his colleagues, joined us to make use of our big data. He analyzes our traffic to figure out how to make our products more user-focused.

Sasha brings research skills and industry knowledge to Team Skimlinks. In his PhD at the University of Southampton, he studied how large societies share information and how they should fight with false rumours. Now he faces an even larger number of users in our publisher networks and works on transferring the cutting-edge research to our problems.

Before that, he gained industrial skills by running a development team for 4 years with his friends in Kyiv, Ukraine, where he is originally from. He spends all his free time watching documentaries about nature, reading oceanography books and planning new expeditions to the depth of the seas.

Steph is responsible for our operations and infrastructure and makes sure that everything runs smoothly. He's a keen practitioner of DevOps and is the resident go-to man for all things Cloudy.

Before joining Skimlinks, Steph ran large infrastructure operations in the US and UK for Moreover technologies, and prior to that administered servers in the UK and continental Europe supporting clients in television, telecommunications and new media.

When not on the servers he can be found tinkering with Linux on mobile devices & marshalling street skates in London's active rollerskating scene.

Neenu joins us from Kerala, South India as a QA Engineer. She loves to find bugs and automate test scripts.

Before moving to London, she was working as test analyst in India after completing her Engineering in Electronics and Communication.

Recently Neenu has been developing a passion for Android development. In her spare time she loves to test out her cooking skills on her husband, watch Bollywood movies and surf IMDB.com.

Catherine is the newest addition to the QA team, having originally been a member of the Operations team. She enjoys getting to grips with all the new processes at Skimlinks and making them as perfect as possible. A mixologist at heart, Catherine seeks to combine the disparate chunks of tracking URLs during the day, while avoiding unrefined ingredients of a more liquid variety at night.

Hailing from London, Catherine is the only member of the cockney contingent at Skimlinks, although she usually manages to hide it well. She loves detective novels, classical literature, spaghetti westerns and theatre, amongst many other things.

Cliff is made in China and grew up near Mount Wudang, the Mecca for Taoists and internal martial arts. Cliff actually found western culture and religion more attractive, which led to him coming to study in London for an MSc in Internet Computing at Queen Mary back in 2003. Upon graduation, he joined ReportLab, one of the first companies to use Python in the UK. He then spent 6 years working on a distributed ticketing system for cinema chains, first with Arts Alliance Media then spun off as Newman Online.

At Skimlinks, Cliff works in the platform team, where he helps make a fast and accurate backend to empower our business. He occasionally joins business meetings whenever his Chinese language is found useful. Being an aspiring software craftsman, Cliff always strives to find the balance between dogmatism and pragmatism. Right now, he finds BDD natural and elegant for growing software.

Cliff's spare time is mostly spent with his young toddler son, patiently waiting for him to grow old enough to play PES together.

Riccardo joins us from Rome, where he completed his Computer Science degree last year. He has lived in London since 2011 working for Google before finding Skimlinks.

His experience is in text processing, Automated Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech systems, with a side passion for Artificial Intelligence techniques. His experience and awesome ponytail make him a great addition to Team SkimWords.

When he's not busy building on SkimWords technology, you can often find him working on one of his side projects, playing video games or hanging with friends, or out at the pub. He also likes to watch movies & read comics, and as a hobby he makes some electronic devices, playing with the solder and transistors.

Daniel joins Skimlinks from Rome, having been studying for his degree in UK for the last 3 years. He has worked on almost all the Skimlinks products including the Publisher Hub (both frontend & backend), working with amazing technologies like Backbone, D3 and AMD, and working on SkimWords in many different areas including the Product API, the core JavaScript and the build systems.

Previous to Skimlinks, Daniel co-founded Italian startup Gnammo, a social eating platform. He was also staff at EuroPython 2012 based in Florence.

While Daniel hasn't still graduated from university, he already holds a first class degree in shouting and gesticulating. Daniel's life is like running from one falling star to another till it drops. He is constantly on the road and loves challenges. His travels include Italy's east coast by bike, Copenhagen to Stockholm by bike, and Rome to Paris hitchhiking.

Matthieu's role as VP Platform & Operations means he is truly the backbone of the Skimlinks operation. From speccing new products, to managing the roadmap, keeping the payroll in order, to paying publisher commissions: he looks after it all.

Matthieu and Alicia met in Sydney, in a job interview. Alicia was going on a 6 week holiday and had a week to train someone to take over her job of running the entire ad management platform for Fairfax, one of Australia's largest online publishers. Matthieu stepped up to the plate, and not only learnt everything in a week, but by the time Alicia came back from holidays, found herself wonderfully redundant.

When Alicia heard that Matthieu was leaving Sydney to return to Europe, she snapped him up. He now runs Skimlinks, keeps everyone in line and religiously enjoys a Diet Fanta at 4pm every day. He's also teaches the rest of the team about the magic of pivot (Pivard) tables, and manages to juggle the start-up life along with being a new dad to little 'SkimBaby'!

At Skimlinks Amy's main concern is money. She watches over the commission imports and company credit cards whilst keeping an eye on all things SkimWords. She also organises things, mostly parties, and is the go-to girl for anything & everything Skimlinks social.

Inside and outside work Amy loves a good party (foursquare can attest to that!). She likes to keep on top of what's going on in the world of events, whether it be an interpretive dance fling or a techno fist pump - the grimier the venue the better. And if there's even a chance a Roland TB-303 will feature in the proceedings, she's there in a flash.

Ajay left his hometown of Los Angeles to join Skimlinks London as Product Director, where he leads our product strategy.

After studying chemistry and spending a couple of years in research laboratories, he fell in love with the fast-paced consumer web world. Although his focus has been the management of business operations, he still sharpens his Python skills with quick reporting scripts, natural language parsing, and social media aggregation projects. As a result, he is teased for his overuse of the phrase "dive into the data".

He is usually outgoing, but loves to retreat into his headphones and listen to melancholy music or NPR podcasts while sipping copious amounts of green tea. He also enjoys cooking and does a poor job of keeping his food snobbery secret as evidenced by his tweeting and yelping.

Jo's role as Skimlinks' Product Manager means she gets to work closely with every member of the Skimlinks family, colleagues & partners alike. Having started at Skimlinks as an Account Manager & then our first Business Analyst, her current role allows her to shape how we develop our technology & tools to best suit our client's needs, from ideas generation to delivery of final products.

Jo joined Skimlinks after working as a freelance web manager, while simultaneously completing an MSc in Computer Science at UCL. With a first degree in Photography, she is the Skimlinks photographer-in-residence. Jo grew up in Texas but is British-born and her distinctive take on the English language keeps everyone guessing exactly where she is from.

With a love of all things free in London (and a strange fascination with the color green), you will often find Jo browsing the books at the British Library and getting involved in late nights at the V&A and Science Museum.

Hardip is one of the Skimlinks old-timers and has worked in pretty much every department going! Previously a Senior Account Manager and Customer Systems Analyst - she now uses her experiences within the Product team.

Before Skimlinks, Hardip studied a BSc in Computing at Portsmouth University

Hardip enjoys eating halloumi, ham sandwiches, sushi (in fact, all eating in general!), festivals, staying up all night, turning off the air-con and exploring London on her bike. Hardip wants to travel the world one day and has an awesome collection of hairy jackets.

Ellie is Skimlinks' Junior Designer, creating graphics and illustrations for the Skimlinks website, blog, newsletters and publications. She strives to ensure Skimlinks maintains a fresh, consistent visual language.

Before joining Skimlinks, Ellie completed an art foundation in Brighton and a degree at Kingston University where she studied Illustration and Animation. She went on to work freelance, doing editorial illustration for clients including Computer Arts, Another, Grafik and The Clerkenwell Post.

When she's not busy illustrating, Ellie loves going to exhibitions, design events and generally keeps an eye on what's going on within the creative industry. Ellie's interests include good food, being outdoors, design blogs/magazines, the beach and big dogs.

TimLum is your typical Third Culture Kid, nationality crisis at every turn. His obsession with analyzing people and cultures makes him the perfect fit to be our Director of Insight and Intelligence, where he makes our data strategic and understandable.

Prior to London and Skimlinks, TimLum worked for a global charity in Seattle and obtained his MA in Sociology there. Having built web pages since the days of HTML3 and databases since the days of Access, he is a bit of a jack of all trades: one part demographic statistician, one part dev, one part digital strategist and two parts closet baker.

When not slogging away, he can be found slowly plodding around Hyde Park, tricycling around Richmond Park, and wishing he was in some other European parc, parken, parque. TimLum has a weird database knowledge of flight timetables and enjoys geekily studying the transit maps of different countries of the world. Go Hoosiers!

Skimlinks' Swedish financial whiz, Sofia joins us as Financial Controller, with several years experience in finance and accounting and an MSc in Economics. Sofia is our numbers gal and the invisible hand to make sure the office runs smoothly. An avid Formula One fan, Sofia also loves travelling, lived in San Francisco for two and a half years, and has been in London now for ten.

She's addicted to Hello Kitty handbags and stationery and loves gadgets too, including her Chumby and Roomba.

Asha joins Skimlinks as a Financial Controller, making sure we look after the pennies and watch the purse strings. Asha most recently worked at the digital agency Fortune Cookie where she was the financial controller for operations in Europe, United States and Australia, steering the company from a very small size to a business that today generates $25m turnover.

Asha is super hard working, quietly asserting her hand where it is needed, always with a cheeky smile shining through her eyes.

As our Marketing Director, Aaron wears all kinds of marketing hats in order to tell the world about Skimlinks and its superior technology.

Aaron is based out of our San Francisco office, although he relishes the opportunity to dive into data and strategy discussions with the product team in London whenever he can. He is always down to talk philosophy, stemming back to his PPE major at UPenn.

Previously, Aaron spent time in both Sales and Product Marketing at Google, managing the Google homepage and Doodle program worldwide, and most recently branding and direct response efforts for Google Maps.

When not behind a computer, Aaron can either be found on the basketball court or at the espresso machine. He also pretends like he paints and plays the guitar on a regular basis, but we've yet to see him actually do it.

Adrienne is our Head of Communications, working with media every day to spread the word about Skimlinks and finding new ways to tell the Skimlinks story.

During a two-year stint in London, Adrienne found her passion for communications and storytelling, and started her official PR career promptly upon moving back to San Francisco. Pursuing her interest in technology innovation, Adrienne did PR for HP, Intuit and Polycom before getting bitten by the startup bug.

With an international identity at heart, Adrienne loves travelling, cycling, discussing French literature, sustainability and the future of fashion over a fantastic cup of English tea.

A Third Culture Kid raised mostly in the Americas, Alice originally hails from France. After an MA in Global Media and Communications from the University of Warwick where she specialised in online communities, Alice joined Skimlinks as part of the Approvals Team becoming the first point of contact for many of our publishers!

Thanks to her obsession with the internet, she has also successfully managed to wheedle herself into the marketing team and is now in charge of the company's social media presence.

In her spare time, Alice can be found pursuing her love of culture by learning new languages (currently Japanese) travelling to places near and far, and indulging in global popular culture forms – from London exhibitions to American TV shows and Korean pop music.

Yuri is Skimlinks' Japanese aficionado, helping us with our expansion into the Japan market. Before joining Skimlinks, she was studying and interning in Spain and France, working on a variety of projects, specialising in different cultural marketing situations.

Yuri is an avid traveller (10 countries so far) and loves trying new things such as Flamenco, mountain climbing, swimming, and cooking up a storm with her multi-geographical recipe repertoire. She's also a lover of great weather, so is a bit worried about experiencing London in the winter.

Mark is the Account Director at Skimlinks, responsible for account management: looking after all the lovely Skimlinks publishers and promoting our thousands of merchants in the best possible way. Mark is based out of our San Francisco office and manages partnerships for our most important North American partners.

Previously, Mark worked at another web startup, Swoopo, running innovative online auctions and prior to that, had fun living in Philadelphia performing brain scanning research. If you ever want to know what role the fusiform gyrus has in familiar face perception, just ask!

Among other things, Mark likes french music blogs, the two-foot high dinosaur that lives on his desk and pretending to train for triathlons. His favourite sandwich filling is Coronation Chicken.

Jenny is a San Francisco native working in the London office and has shown her range of ability with Skimlinks, starting out managing Social Media before moving on to Business Development and now, she's focused on merchants as Merchant Manager.

A start-up junkie, Jenny previously worked for a health website in Boston while studying at Boston University and an independent natural pet food company in Los Angeles before leaping across the pond. She loves decorating her passport. If you ever want to know where to eat or what deal you can get, just ask Jenny. Her insatiable and curious appetite constantly guides her to new places and, if there's a discount to get, she is on it.

John has taken a spot on the Skimlinks team as an Account Manager, helping to keep things running smoothly for our publishers.

London born and raised, John worked in the Middle East as a writer before starting a career in IT Support leading into his role at Skimlinks.

Johnny is an old man at heart, happiest in the middle of a good game of chess with a nice cup of tea. He enjoys philosophising over a good book or film and every now and again he hears the call of the wild and sets off on another adventure to see a new part of the world.

Crystina is the Skimlinks Merchant Coordinator, responsible for spreading SkimLove to our merchants. Her focus is on the Preferred Partner Program where she amps up the Skimlinks Advantage by bringing in new merchants and collaborating to promote our partners.

Crystina comes to us from the University of Warwick where she studied German and Business Studies and took opportunities to travel and work in Germany. Luckily for us, in addition to her German skills, she also has an amazing knack for analyzing and interpreting data.

A lover of foreign language, food, and music, she has an affinity for Kpop (before Gangnam Style!), sushi, and playing various musical instruments. She's fluent in Chinese, English, and German, and is currently trying to learn Korean and Japanese. She fits in great with our ambitious crew, filling the rest of her free time dabbling in web design & badminton.

Based in San Francisco, Buck oversees all Skimlinks' revenue-related functions including new business development, account management, and merchant relations. A longtime startup guy, he brings with him experience in everything from sales and business development to product development and management.

Originally from the Philadelphia area, Buck studied biology at Bucknell University and did a stint in Washington, DC before moving to San Francisco during the original dotcom boom. Having caught the technology startup bug, he can't imagine living anywhere else.

Buck loves everything about the 415. Well except the fog. And the Giants. And the 49ers. But commuting by ferry every day rocks!

Geoff is part of the Business Development team at Skimlinks, spreading the wonderful word of what we do and helping to bring some great clients on board. Prior to Skimlinks, Geoff worked for an international IT recruitment firm in the Square Mile, learning the tricks of the trade, before starting his own recruitment agency, with two friends, in Mayfair.

With a degree in Sculpture under his belt, Geoff loves anything and everything creative, whether it's building a tasty sandwich or a giant ice sculpture, and he often likes to share with the team what's happening in the world of modern art!

Jeff advises Skimlinks on business development and strategic initiatives. Jeff joined Skimlinks in 2010 and has served as VP of Sales and Chief Revenue Officer in London. He currently lives in Boston.

Previously, Jeff was Managing Director Europe for TrialPay and established the company's international headquarters in Berlin - despite "Ich spreche kein Deutsch"

Jeff holds a B.A. in Government from Harvard University. He has lived in Boston, NYC, SF, London, and Berlin. Ignoring social judgment, Jeff is known for popping a (generally short-lived) handstand in famous locations around the globe. We believe he learned this skill in his CrossFit class.