Jamie Buchanan
Founder & CTO, Rogue Digital
London, United Kingdom
Who I am
I'm a technology leader with over 15 years of experience architecting and scaling enterprise systems across automotive, travel, e-commerce, and financial services. I founded Rogue Digital to give growing businesses the same calibre of senior technical leadership that venture-backed scale-ups rely on, without the twelve-month procurement cycle or the agency overhead.
Most of my career has been spent inside operating businesses, not agencies. That distinction shapes how I think about software: technology is a means to commercial outcomes, not an end in itself. The best architectures are the ones that let a business move faster, hire more cheaply, and change direction without collapsing. The worst are the ones that look elegant on a whiteboard and become expensive constraints eighteen months later.
The common thread across everything I've built is a bias towards simplicity under pressure. Distributed systems, AI pipelines, headless commerce, legacy migrations: the interesting engineering problems are almost always the same problem wearing different clothes, how do you move fast without accumulating the kind of complexity that will quietly strangle the business two years from now.
Experience
Founder & CTO, Rogue Digital (2024 to present)
Leading technical strategy and delivery for a digital transformation agency serving mid-market and enterprise clients. Rogue specialises in AI product work, e-commerce replatforming, CRM and workflow automation, and legacy modernisation. The operating model is senior-only: every engagement is led and delivered by people with decades of experience inside operating businesses.
CTO, Vanarama (2017 to 2024)
Provided board-level CTO leadership across a seven-year transformation, responsible for technology, product, credit-risk and data platforms. Helped grow the in-house technology and product team from a single person to over 30, built the credit-risk and data platform capabilities required for an FCA-regulated financial services business, and led the technical workstreams for two VC funding rounds and the company's £200m acquisition by AutoTrader UK Plc. Company valuation grew 10× during that period.
Earlier career
Prior to Vanarama, I worked across automotive, travel, and technology sectors in engineering and architecture roles. I learned the hard way that the most expensive architectural decisions are the ones made without commercial context: elegant rewrites with no measurable business outcome, premature platform migrations, over-ambitious integrations that outlasted the strategic rationale for building them. Those early lessons are why I now start every engagement by asking what the business is actually trying to do, before anyone opens an IDE.
What I focus on
My work sits at the intersection of technical architecture and commercial strategy. I'm most useful to companies making decisions whose consequences will play out over years: platform migrations, legacy modernisation programmes, AI adoption, scaling the engineering organisation, or positioning the business for investment or acquisition.
- -E-commerce architecture (Shopify Plus, Magento, headless)
- -Legacy system modernisation and strangler-fig migrations
- -AI and RAG pipelines in production
- -Technical due diligence for investors and acquirers
- -Fractional CTO and engineering leadership
- -Technical SEO for e-commerce at scale
Writing
I write regularly on the Rogue Insights blog: practical guides for founders, CTOs, and senior operators on the decisions that actually matter when scaling a business. The goal is to publish the kind of writing I wish I'd had access to fifteen years ago: opinionated, grounded in first-hand experience, and honest about the trade-offs.
Get in touch
If you're thinking about a technology decision whose consequences will outlast the current sprint, I'd be happy to hear about it.