Sean Hawie

Technology leader · applied AI · exited founder

London, UK · CTO, Head of Engineering or AI, VP Engineering and technical product roles · full-time, fractional or contract

Connect on LinkedIn

About

I build products and the teams that ship them. Twenty years across engineering, founding and product leadership, now focused on applied AI: agents, retrieval, evaluation and deployment in production, not research.

I started as a developer on electronic-trading APIs, spent six years leading web and e-commerce delivery for enterprise clients including Lloyds Bank, Microsoft, RBS and Eurostar, then founded Oculizm, a B2B SaaS platform that helped retailers turn social content into conversion. I ran it end to end for six years, from first line of code to GTM, and sold it to Soreto in 2024, staying on as Chief Product Officer to integrate the products and help the combined business reach break-even.

Since then I have been building with generative AI: a consumer video app taken from idea to production as a solo founder, and today the architecture and engineering leadership of an early-stage, venture-backed AI coaching platform, where the team ships multi-step agent workflows, retrieval and evaluation pipelines in production.

What I do

Technical leadership

CTO, fractional CTO and VP Engineering roles for seed to Series B companies. Architecture, hiring, delivery and the hard build-versus-buy calls, while staying close enough to the code to make sharp decisions.

Applied AI

LLM and vision APIs into real products: agent orchestration, RAG, evals, observability and cost control per generation. Production systems on AWS, GCP and Cloudflare, built with OpenAI, Fal, Kling and Google Cloud Vision.

Product and commercial

Roadmaps, pricing, positioning and go-to-market from founder context through post-acquisition integration. Analytics and KPI ownership, R&D tax relief claims, and the commercial strategy that pays for the engineering.

Path

2026 →
Fractional CTO, early-stage AI coaching platformVenture-backed start-up. Architecture and technical leadership; agent workflows, RAG and evals in production; hiring for engineering and ML.
2025 – 2026
Founder, Groovely AIConsumer generative-video app, built and launched solo. Tested paid acquisition, found the unit economics did not support scale, and paused rather than fund an unproven model.
2024
Chief Product Officer, SoretoPost-acquisition mandate: product direction, integration of Oculizm, analytics, and applied computer vision for e-commerce (CLIP and DINO product recognition).
2017 – 2024
Founder and CEO, OculizmB2B SaaS for retailers including The Fragrance Shop, Ribble Cycles and Moda in Pelle. Product, engineering, infrastructure and GTM. Acquired by Soreto, March 2024.
2011 – 2017
Founder and lead developer, London City MediaWeb and e-commerce delivery for Lloyds Bank, Microsoft, RBS and Eurostar. Line-managed in-house and remote developers.
2005 – 2010
Electronic Trading API Specialist and technical consultantThomson Reuters, then Greenline Financial Technologies. Electronic-trading integrations for banks and brokers.

Selected work

Exit · 2024

Oculizm acquired by Soreto

Six years from founding to a trade sale. Coverage in UK Tech News and Retail Technology Review.

Generative video · 2025–26

Groovely AI

End-to-end video generation pipeline orchestrating OpenAI, Google Cloud Vision, Fal and Kling; Expo client, NestJS API. Live at groovely.ai.

Background

Education — BSc (Hons) Computer Science, The University of Edinburgh. Harrow School.
Mentoring — ABM-qualified business mentor; structured mentorship for founders.
Stack — TypeScript, Python, React and React Native, Node/NestJS, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, AWS, GCP, Cloudflare.
Based — London, UK.