Per Hammer

I lead a multi-year agility transformation across 500+ staff and 40+ teams, working through a network of 20 Agility Leads. I shape the strategy, define practical playbooks, and design, capture, and analyse metrics that balance teams' autonomy and agency with disciplined execution and the organisation's need for oversight and moving beyond simple velocity metrics to instil an agile mind-set. These metrics connect delivery improvement with business priorities across a complex organisation.

Through focused facilitation, coaching, and leadership development, I develop the Agility Leads and strengthen their coaching skills. Together, we help teams build the capability to improve continuously, collaborate across boundaries, and deliver valuable products more effectively.

I supervise students on the School's MSc IT+ programme, participate in its Education & Practice (EAP) section, and teach the Honours and Masters level "Software Product Release Engineering" course, which I designed.

As an Advisory Board member, I helped shape The Data Lab's educational initiatives through guidance on educational partnerships, professional development, and skills programming. I worked with fellow board members to identify emerging trends and industry needs, supported the development of relevant skills and continuing professional development programmes, and fostered relationships between academic and industry partners.

I was appointed through a competitive, government-funded Visiting Professors scheme to strengthen links between industry and academia.

I developed and taught an advanced course for MSci and final-year BSc (Hons) students, bringing practical, collaborative software engineering experience into the curriculum.

As Senior Director of Developer Platforms and Programmes for Education, I led global engineering, product, and design teams responsible for GitHub's education strategy, programmes, and product roadmap. I worked across GitHub and with educators, institutions, and external partners to understand the needs of students and learners, and to shape practical ways for them to develop collaborative software development skills.

During my tenure, we broadened GitHub Education's remit from "students" to "learners" more broadly, making its programmes more welcoming to people learning through non-traditional routes and settings. Through strategic partnerships, community-building, and hands-on support, we expanded access to GitHub's educational resources and strengthened support for open-source education worldwide.

As an Industry Advisory Board member, I collaborated with fellow board members to help the School of Computing Science validate its existing strategy and provide industry feedback to guide its future direction. I contributed to quarterly board meetings and supported collaboration between academia and industry, helping connect the School's work with practical application for students and researchers.

As Social Learning Lead for JPMorgan's Global Technology organisation, I created and grew the creation and growth of more than 200 active Communities of Practice, connecting over 50,000 technologists through peer-led, community-powered learning. What began as a passion project in 2016 evolved into my full-time role by 2018.

I helped communities self-organise within a shared framework that gave them visibility across the firm, reusable patterns for learning, and practical organisational support. By helping engineers share knowledge, solve real problems, and build skills together, I enabled lessons and effective practices to spread across the enterprise rather than remain isolated within individual teams.

Prior to 2018, I combined hands-on software engineering with development-team management, system architecture, and product ownership. I led teams of 5 to 85 people while delivering and improving technology in a complex, large-scale environment.

As a volunteer lecturer, I developed and taught the "Advanced Software Engineering Practices" course for fourth-year Computing Science and Masters-level participants, reaching over 500 students. I designed the curriculum to connect academic theory with industry best practices, giving participants advanced technical skills and practical experience in modern software engineering, with an emphasis on collaborative practice.

As Build Manager for a geographically dispersed software development team, I coordinated the delivery of core functions for JPMorgan's Global Derivatives business. I aligned build and integration work across distributed teams to support reliable, high-performing deployments in a complex, fast-paced environment.

I began at IBM in 1995, developing bespoke systems for the EMEA Tech Support Centre and Greenock assembly plant, and contributing features and plug-ins for Tivoli products. I then specialised in Java back-end development for interactive media start-ups, working on advertising, gaming, and web-based chat-support products from about 2001.

I joined Vamosa in 2005, where I led the software engineering department while remaining hands-on in software design and implementation. I guided technical strategy and product development.