Andrew Waters
I'm a software engineer, woodworker, producer and CTO based in Newcastle. I run the technology at Ctrl Hub, where we build software that helps the biggest utility and infrastructure organisations in the UK move their operations from the filing cabinet to digital processes.
I started out in the 2000s writing PHP and buying servers to rack in datacentres, building SaaS on top of them. I moved into Golang, Cloud, DevOps, Engineering Management and Leadership, always still remaining hands on. Along the way I've also helped NCFE develop their T Level qualifications in Software Engineering.
Away from a keyboard I make electronic music and sawdust, in roughly equal measure.
Where I've worked
- CTOCtrl Hub 2023–present
Running the technology for the platform taking UK utility and infrastructure operations off paper. Working with Cadent, NGN, SGN, ENWL and lots more.
- Head of Engineeringubio 2019–2023
Joined in DevOps, moved into engineering management, then Head of Engineering. 250 million automations per week and over $1 billion in transactions for Google, Trivago, Microsoft, TickX and more.
- Platform EngineerMoltin 2015–2019
Employee number two at the ecommerce startup following a Y Combinator raise, rebuilding the platform to be API first, through to its acquisition by Elastic Path.
- Founderband-x media 2005–2015
My own studio. Built Freedom CMS and worked with arts and cultural organisations across the North East including Baltic and Tyneside Cinema.
Some of my projects
- Orchard is a tool I built off the back of WWDC 2025 as an open source project, so that I could play with Apple Containers - with a view to replacing Docker on my own machines. It has now been installed tens of thousands of times and is used by engineers at Apple, Microsoft, Vercel, NVIDIA, IBM, Stripe, Cisco, LinkedIn, Uber, GitHub, Red Hat, SUSE, Amazon, VMware, Siemens, Hitachi, Alibaba, Tencent, MongoDB, Honeycomb, Automattic and more.
- Sonara coming soonSonara started as a tool for my own home studio. Build up your rig from a library of audio gear with real specifications, plan the routing and wiring for audio, MIDI, USB and power, then model the room itself — its contents and its acoustic treatment. It analyses your speaker placement as you work and recommends changes based on early reflections, boundary interference and room modes, so you can move things and see the result immediately.
- Scillo coming soonReal time audio visualisations built on Metal.
Some technologies I work with
- Languages Go, Swift, Vue, Node, PHP, React Native
- Data Kafka, MongoDB, Postgres, Neo4j, Redis, Clickhouse, MySQL
- Infrastructure Kubernetes, GCP, Terraform, Argo
- Observability OTel, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, Mimir