About Me

I’m Rob West, a software engineering leader and transformational coach based in Oxfordshire.

I’ve spent more than twenty years building software and leading engineering organisations. Over that time my interests have gradually moved up through the layers of the system: from writing software, to architecture and engineering practices, to teams, organisations and ultimately the conditions that allow people to perform at their best.

Today I’m Head of Software Product Engineering at Aurora Energy Research. I lead the engineering teams responsible for Aurora’s software products, working at the intersection of software engineering, energy modelling and product development.

Engineering as a system

I still love technology, but I’m increasingly interested in the system within which technology gets built.

Software development is a creative, collaborative process operating under conditions of uncertainty. Improving it therefore requires more than choosing better tools or hiring talented engineers.

I think a lot about team design and cognitive load, the flow of work through organisations, fast feedback, continuous delivery, developer experience and the relationship between architecture and organisational structure. Ideas from systems thinking, Lean, Team Topologies and the DORA research have been particularly influential on how I approach engineering leadership.

My aim is to build organisations in which teams have clear purpose, meaningful autonomy and the technical environment necessary to deliver valuable software frequently and sustainably.

Technology continues to fascinate me too. I’m particularly interested in cloud-native software, observability, platform engineering and the rapidly changing role of AI in software development.

The human system

My other enduring fascination is people.

I studied philosophy and psychology to postgraduate level at the University of Oxford. Years later, training as a transformational coach brought me back to many of those interests and fundamentally changed the way I thought about leadership.

I’m an EMCC-accredited coach and an EQ-i 2.0 practitioner. My coaching practice draws on psychology, neuroscience, mindfulness and the idea of the Thinking Environment developed by Nancy Kline.

One principle in particular has stayed with me: the quality of a person’s thinking is affected by the quality of attention we give them.

That has implications far beyond formal coaching. It affects one-to-ones, meetings, organisational culture and leadership itself.

I’m particularly interested in motivation, attention, psychological safety, behaviour change and the way our evolved emotional systems shape how we respond to uncertainty and threat. I see leadership less as having the answers and more as creating an environment in which good thinking can happen.

Performance

Outside work, I’m a competitive cyclist specialising in track pursuit and time trials.

In 2024 I was part of the Team Ohten team that won the 45–54 Team Pursuit at the UCI Masters Track World Championships in Roubaix, setting a world-best time. I’m also a British Masters Champion and UCI Masters World Championship silver medallist in the Individual Pursuit.

Training and competing at that level alongside a demanding career has become another laboratory for many of the ideas that interest me professionally.

Performance emerges from a system: training load, recovery, physiology, psychology, equipment, environment and hundreds of small decisions interacting over time. Progress depends on measurement and feedback, but also on knowing which measurements matter.

There are obvious parallels with engineering organisations.

What I write about

This website is where I explore those overlapping interests.

You’ll find writing about software engineering and engineering leadership, organisational design and systems thinking, coaching and psychology, philosophy, AI and occasionally cycling and human performance.

The subjects may appear quite different, but the question underneath them is usually the same:

How can we understand a system well enough to help it become better?