I spent 12 years in the Royal Marines before moving into technology.

The transition taught me that the best leadership principles work whether you’re commanding a unit or scaling an engineering team: clear communication, systematic problem-solving, and never asking people to do things you wouldn’t do yourself.

Over the past two decades, I’ve built and scaled engineering teams at companies from Series A to unicorn.

At Blockdaemon, I took the team from 10 to 187 engineers across 14 countries while maintaining 96% retention—28 percentage points better than industry average.

The work included the kind of problems that break most scaling companies: keeping your best engineers when everyone’s trying to poach them, cutting infrastructure costs 70% while handling more load, and building teams across time zones that actually function.

I went fractional after Blockdaemon because I realised I could help multiple Series A companies avoid the expensive mistakes I made, rather than waiting for another unicorn opportunity that might never come.

I write about the specific, tactical problems that Series A engineering leaders face: retention systems that actually work, infrastructure decisions that prevent 3am emergencies, when you actually need AI versus when it’s just hype, and how to prepare for technical due diligence.

This isn’t theory. It’s what worked (and what failed) when I was doing the job.

Now: Fractional CTO working with Series A/B companies Previously: CTO at Blockdaemon (unicorn), Valence | Royal Marines

lloyd@lloydmoore.com | https://linkedin.com/in/moorelloyd