Marco Mark · career, 1996
I tend to notice something a business has overlooked, build a version that proves the point, then hand it over to the team to run. This is how that's played out so far.
Before the CV · Late 1990s
Before any of the jobs there was WorldsAway, a virtual world where you walked around as an avatar and chatted to people from all over the place. It later became vzones. People were building plugins and add-ons for it, and that completely fascinated me.
So as a teenager I bought a Learn Visual Basic 5 book and started making my own. Auto-responders for ESPs, which were the game's private messages. Mini-games like Bingo and Trivia that people could run inside the world.
And people bought them. Actual cheques turned up in the post from all over the world. Not loads, but for a teenager in the late 90s that was quite special.
Real WorldsAway screenshots from worldsaway.com, 1996 and 1997, via the Wayback Machine. © Fujitsu Software Corporation.
July 1997 – January 2004 · Various agencies, Cornwall
My first proper jobs were in small Cornish agencies, and the pattern showed up straight away. At an internet cafe I helped take the business from selling the odd £500 computer to winning commercial network contracts.
The web side went the same way. Projects went from £500 static sites to £10K+ database driven builds. Each time it was about spotting where the business could move upmarket and helping it get there.
January 2004 – September 2010 · Website and Marketing Manager
A motorsport equipment business I helped build from nothing to £1M a year. I looked after all of it: the website, the back office, payments, fulfilment and the marketing.
The bit I'm proudest of is the shipping calculator. At the time nobody could give you an accurate international shipping price online for a mixed basket. Couriers charge on whichever is higher, the real weight or the volumetric weight, and a helmet box is mostly air.
So I worked out how much of every parcel could realistically be filled. A pair of gloves fits inside a helmet. Combine things sensibly, keep the overall dimensions down, and the price drops. The site ran on classic ASP, which wasn't fast enough for the maths, so I wrote a Windows DLL in Visual Basic to do the heavy lifting. Any combination of items, anywhere in the world, priced instantly.
We quickly became one of the top handful of motorsport equipment suppliers in the industry. I also built an eBay listing generator that turned supplier spreadsheets into thousands of listings, which brought in over £10K a month almost straight away.
The real rallynuts.com, May 2005, via the Wayback Machine.
I joined a traditional print publication to run its website and soon realised the bigger opportunity was the whole business, not just the site. So I wrote a digital strategy that moved it from print first to digitally led.
Part of that was getting the data in one place. I put in a Microsoft Dynamics CRM for 30+ people across the business and brought in over 30,000 customer records. Last I heard it was still in use more than ten years later.
The other part was changing how decisions got made, with analytics and split testing so we could look at what actually happened instead of arguing about opinions. Somewhere in the middle of that I also finished a Foundation Degree in Web Technology through Plymouth University at Truro College.
The real gasworld.com, June 2014, via the Wayback Machine.
January 2016 – April 2020 · Falmouth · Technical Lead and Digital Strategy
I led a team of four to eight developers and looked after delivery, resourcing and proposals. The jump in project size came from a few things, mostly how we operated and how we sold what we did.
We proved the value first, through strategy and UX workshops with clients like the Ritz Club and Skinflint Design. We got clients onto retainers rather than one-off builds. And we lined the whole team up on one way of working, with version control, code standards, Laravel and our own frameworks.
The real dewsign.co.uk, February 2020, via the Wayback Machine.
Open source, built along the way
installs on Packagist for the Laravel packages that came out of standardising how we built things. The Laravel Nova CMS that ran our bigger projects was open source too.
Download counts from packagist.org, October 2026.
May 2020 – Nov 2021 · Remote
Senior Front-End Developer. With a team of four we built three connected platforms for wealth management firms from nothing: a client portal, a business admin portal and a Node service that turned investment research into PDFs.
Nov 2021 – Jun 2022
Tech Lead at an early-stage startup building an emotional intelligence platform. I was the whole technical team, so everything technical was mine to deliver.
June 2022 – 2024 · Haven Holidays · Engineering Team Lead
I joined Haven to lead the team behind holiday search and booking, used by millions of people a year. The usual instinct with search is to copy Amazon or Airbnb: filters everywhere, a big grid of results, every choice on the screen at once.
I thought the opposite would work better for booking a holiday. A stepped journey where you only make one decision at a time. It did. That redesign was the biggest of a set of changes we estimated at around £10M in extra revenue, and in reality it was probably worth more.
Around the same time I spotted a chance to use AI in revenue management. I built a working prototype on my own, got it in front of the right people, and had backing and budget inside three months. Then I handed it to a dedicated team to take forward.
2024 – 2026 · Haven Holidays · AI Engineering Lead
Fabric runs park operations: facility and caravan maintenance, grounds, sitings, cleaning and preventative maintenance. It's live in production, and every line of it was written by AI. I don't write code by hand any more. I direct ten to twenty agents at a time instead.
I'm proud of the whole thing rather than one feature. I designed the architecture myself, deliberately agent friendly and fully offline capable, because park teams don't always have signal. I worked hard on getting the team aligned on new ways of working, and pushed just as hard on changing how the park teams themselves work.
Since the cleaning feature rolled out, the pilot park has already brought its cost per clean down, and the estimate is millions a year in savings once it reaches every park. The maintenance side is harder to put a number on, but it's there. The way the team works also became the template for AI engineering across Haven's Product and Technology organisation.
Otto is the desktop app I built to run all those agent sessions. It's been my only development environment for months.
lines in production
10 to 20 agents at once
Since 1 September 2026 · Haven Holidays · Perranporth, Cornwall
“Agentic engineering makes production cheap. What's scarce now is judgement: deciding what's worth building, and telling whether it worked.”
The new role takes what worked on Fabric and applies it across the organisation. I work across squads and disciplines on practical AI adoption, engineering standards and new ways of working.
I try to stay close to the real problems teams have, go on evidence rather than hype, and roll things out once for everyone instead of squad by squad. Once building stops being the bottleneck, the bottleneck moves to everything around it, and a lot of the job turns out to be about people rather than models.
Bilingual in English and German. Usually in the sea or out with a camera.
marcomark.net, 2019, via the Wayback Machine.
Scene-setting photos on this page are AI generated illustrations. Website and WorldsAway screenshots are real, from the Internet Archive.
