Curriculum vitae
Daniel Bryars
Engineer and founder, 29 years. I co-founded a secure B2B SaaS company, was its CTO through scaling to 40 staff and £8M ARR, and sold it. Before that, Formula One R&D and motorsport electronics. Since then, an MSc in AI with Distinction and a move into robotics.
Different industries, one job: systems that have to work in the physical world, and the question that follows them everywhere — how do we know this is really working?
# Generalist, mostly by accident, and by repeated exposure to real systems.
class DanielBryars:
def current_value(self):
return [
"Builds research and production systems that are observable, reliable and usable",
"Understands physical-world engineering: sensors, actuators, calibration, telemetry, test rigs",
"Can operate as a senior individual contributor, mentor and technical leader",
"Has founded, scaled and sold a company without losing the urge to make things",
]
def favourite_question(self):
return "How do we know this is really working?"Current focus
AI and robot learning
Completed an MSc in Artificial Intelligence with Distinction, focused on robot learning. Built a MuJoCo robot-arm simulation, connected it to a 3D headset via OpenVR, collected teleoperation data, trained PyTorch policies, tracked experiments, managed checkpoints on Hugging Face, and tested policies on physical hardware.
- Research manuscript being reworked for ICRA 2027.
- Practical interest in evaluation: task success, reality gaps, resets, calibration, data quality and failure modes.
- Recent stack includes Python, PyTorch, LeRobot, ACT/ACT-ViT, MuJoCo, W&B and Hugging Face Hub.
Commercial proof
Founder to exit
Co-founded Aeriandi and helped scale it into a B2B SaaS business with 40 staff and £8M ARR. Stayed hands-on as CTO and chief architect through product, platform, hiring, customer trust, compliance, reliability and acquisition.
Physical systems
Motorsport and F1
Started in motorsport electronics: embedded C, engine controllers, sensors, wiring looms, CAN/serial integration, telemetry and high-pressure trackside debugging. Later worked in Formula One R&D on sensors, actuators, software, hardware and automated systems.
Experience
Selected career timeline
Staff Engineer - NeoIntralogistics
Building warehouse systems coordinating autonomous mobile robots and Universal Robots arms.
Head of Technology & Strategy, EMEA - Dubber
Owned technical strategy, platform reliability and compliance after acquisition of Speik.
Technical Director & Founder - Speik
Merged Aeriandi with Voxygen and led technical strategy through acquisition by Dubber.
Chief Technical Officer & Founder - Aeriandi
Co-founded and scaled a secure B2B SaaS company to £8M ARR; chief architect and hands-on developer.
Research and Design Engineer - Red Bull Racing
Delivered R&D software, hardware and automated systems in Formula One.
Lead Programme Manager, F1 Build - Jaguar Racing
Programme-managed cross-functional design, manufacture and build of race-ready F1 cars.
Pi Research / Cosworth
Applications engineering, embedded C, telemetry, sensor integration, wiring, CAN/serial systems, fuel simulation and engine-test automation.
Engineering instincts
Reliability and debugging
- Formal FMEA, explicit failure limits, incident response and operational learning.
- Cross-layer debugging: from an application symptom down to a network trace, a platform behaviour or a scope on a wire.
- Production operations at scale, across cloud and on-premises infrastructure.
Leadership
Teams and strategy
- Hired, built and led engineering teams from two people to forty.
- Owned technical strategy through a merger and two acquisitions.
- Happiest as a hands-on senior IC who can also lead, rather than a manager who used to build.
Compliance
Regulated systems
- PCI DSS, MiFID II, ISO 27001, BS 10008 and GDPR contexts.
- Secure voice, financial and telecom workloads.
- Customer-facing technical leadership where trust matters as much as uptime.
Outside work
The workshop is part of the CV.
A robot arm with printed cycloidal joints. An ESP32 speaker controller built by reverse-engineering a USB protocol with Wireshark. An inverted pendulum, an EV charger smart lead, a self-built family home with curved walls, and a CV packaged like a 1990s software product. Some written up, some still waiting for me to find the good photos, on the projects page.
Education
Qualifications
- MSc Artificial Intelligence, Distinction - University of Leeds, 2026.
- BEng (Hons) Mechatronics - University of Leeds, 1997; award-winning robotic chessboard final-year project.
- AI Residency - ML Institute, London, 2025.
- GCSE French (A), now rusty but not dead.
Patents
Built things with paperwork
European patents EP3230934B1 and EP3230933B1 for secure voice-payment technology.
Human mode
How I like to work
Hands-on senior/staff engineer, happy mentoring and leading, but happiest still playing on the pitch. I like open, trusting, high-performing teams where difficult ideas can be explored without everyone pretending the work is simpler than it is.
Tools
- Languages
- Python, C, C++, C#, TypeScript/JavaScript, SQL, Bash, Lua
- AI and ML
- PyTorch, scikit-learn, MuJoCo, LeRobot, ACT/ACT-ViT, Weights & Biases, Hugging Face
- Platform
- Linux, Docker, CUDA containers, Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, AWS, Azure, CI/CD
- Data and messaging
- AMQP/RabbitMQ, MQTT, CAN, APIs, data pipelines, observability
Contact
Worth a conversation?
Based in Oxford, UK. Interested in staff and principal engineering roles, and hands-on technical leadership, in AI, robotics and physical-world systems. Email is the fastest route; this page prints to a sensible PDF if you need one for a file.