Steve Michael
Founder · Product & technology operator · AI systems architect
Irish Cypriot · Limassol, Cyprus · linkedin.com/in/stevemichael88
Profile
My career has never sat inside a single discipline. I work across business strategy, product, engineering, artificial intelligence, financial services, growth, brand and operations — often taking an idea from concept through architecture, build, launch and the long, unglamorous improvement afterwards.
Roughly two decades of that has been in digital, design and technology, and more than fifteen years within and around financial services: brokerage, prop trading, copy trading, payments and the infrastructure underneath them.
What I am useful for is the whole problem. Not the front end, or the funnel, or the compliance wording, but the fact that those three decisions are the same decision viewed from different chairs.
Current focus is AI-native organisational systems: turning the documents, repositories, policies, brand standards and project history a company already holds into a structured layer its AI systems can retrieve, reason over and act on — with guardrails that make that safe to run against real work.
Experience
AI-native systems & organisational intelligence
2025 — present
Independent · applied across the group
Designing the layer that lets AI systems work against a company's real knowledge instead of a blank context window.
- Built a five-layer organisational brain: linked knowledge, a machine-readable graph index, a routing layer, a specialist capability registry and an execution runtime
- Encoded business process, brand standards, deployment constraints and safety rules as machine-readable instructions
- Established the operating discipline: retrieval before questions, verification before claims, approval gates on anything irreversible
- Applied it to live product work: project-aware coding agents, growth analysis, brand development and documentation
Founder & product lead
2024 — present
Co-founded ventures · fintech products
Taking trading and fintech products from concept to production: architecture, monetisation, growth and brand together.
- Co-founded a broker and prop-firm review directory fused with a social trading network and a copy-trading marketplace
- Designed the advertising and monetisation model, then the attribution architecture that would make the spend measurable
- Scoped a subscription expert-advisor business built on published specifications, server-side licensing and enforced risk ceilings
- Ran brand strategy and identity for both, including the category anti-patterns each brand had to avoid
Digital, product & technology across an FX and fintech group
2019 — present
An FX, prop-trading and payments group
Broad responsibility across the digital, technology, product and marketing operation of a brokerage group and its sub-brands, spanning five CFD and FX brokerages, three asset management firms, a prop-trading platform and a payments business.
- Production brokerage platform: account tiers, signup wizard, live spreads over a streaming price feed, partner programme, marketing-operations CMS
- Prop-trading product: live-pricing plan builder, platform comparison, partner portal, compliance-aware marketing language
- Copy-trading subscription product across web, iOS and Android, with an operations console behind it
- Internal payments BI: multi-format ingestion, commission ledger, branded PDF statements
- Integration of live MetaTrader and MT Manager data into customer-facing surfaces through APIs and sockets
Work outside financial services
2019 — present
Property, insurance and wealth clients
The same method applied to unfamiliar industries, which is the real test of whether a method is a method.
- Property investment business: public site plus a nineteen-page deal-pipeline CRM with automated sourcing, opportunity scoring and refurbishment costing
- Insurance and wealth brokerage: migration from WordPress to Next.js, five enquiry types consolidated onto one hardened API route, live financial calculators
- Each rebuilt from the operating model outward, not from a template inward
Brand, design & digital strategy
2009 — present
Across the group and client work
The continuous strand underneath everything else: identity, campaign systems and the digital strategy around them.
- Identity systems across brokerage, prop trading, payments, broker technology, education and review brands
- Campaign systems including a market-entry campaign with an isometric illustration set and a twelve-icon system
- Award badge programmes, exhibition builds and full collateral systems
- Digital strategy, SEO, CRM, email infrastructure, conversion and funnel work alongside the design
Selected systems
| System | What it is | Stack |
|---|---|---|
| Social Trading Platform | A review directory and social network for active traders | React 18 · FastAPI · MongoDB · Tailwind CSS · shadcn/ui |
| Organisational Brain | A knowledge layer that AI agents can actually work against | Markdown knowledge base · Graph index · Agent runtime · JSON graph · Git |
| Financial Company A | Production platform and marketing operations for a regulated CFD brokerage | React 19 · CRACO · FastAPI · MongoDB · Microsoft SignalR |
| Prop Firm A | Funded-account assessments with a live plan builder and a white-label programme | React 19 · React Router 7 · FastAPI · MongoDB · Framer Motion |
| Copy-Trading SaaS | Messaging-triggered trade copying onto live accounts, sold as a subscription | React 19 · FastAPI · Framer Motion · Tailwind CSS · shadcn/ui |
| Property Group | A property investment business and the deal pipeline that runs it | React 19 · React Router 7 · FastAPI · MongoDB · Search API |
| Insurance Brokerage | Multi-line insurance and wealth brokerage, rebuilt on Next.js | Next.js 15 · React 18 · MongoDB · Directory mail API · Nodemailer |
| Payments Provider · Intelligence Portal | Internal business intelligence for a cross-border payments operation | React 19 · FastAPI · MongoDB · pandas · openpyxl |
| Trading Software Venture | Subscription-licensed trading machines, specified rather than mystified | MQL5 · MQL4 · FastAPI · MongoDB · React |
Capabilities
- Product architecture. Takes a business problem from concept through architecture, build and launch: deciding what should exist, how it is structured, and how it earns.
- Fintech systems. Understands trading products from the business, technology, customer and regulatory sides at once. That is why the same person can specify a spread feed and an IB commission tier.
- Knowledge architecture. Turns scattered company knowledge (documents, repositories, policies, brand standards, project history) into a structured layer that both people and machines can navigate.
- Context engineering. Designs the retrieval path, the rules and the guardrails that decide what an AI agent knows before it acts. That is the difference between a chat window and an operating system.
- AI-assisted engineering. Builds software with agents as a working method, with the constraints, verification and source-control discipline that makes the output trustworthy.
- Growth & attribution. Designs the measurement before the spend, so a campaign result means something when it arrives.
- Marketplace & monetisation design. Designs how a platform earns: what is sold, to which side, at what unit, and what stops it degrading the product.
- Marketing as a system. Treats marketing as an encoded, reusable system instead of a run of one-off campaigns, so the method survives whoever is executing it.
- Pricing & packaging. Structures tiers around a real value metric, with the middle tier built to be the one chosen.
- Brand & identity systems. Builds identity as a system that keeps working after the logo is drawn: variants, tokens, rules and the things the brand refuses to do.
- Design & visual communication. A design foundation that predates the engineering, which is why the systems are built to communicate and not only to function.
- Real-time data. Moves live market and presence data into interfaces without pretending a polling loop is streaming.
- Data pipelines & ingestion. Handles the messy half of business data: partner files arriving in whatever shape the partner felt like sending.
- Internal tooling & operations. Builds the console the business actually runs on, not just the site the customer sees.
- Security-minded build. Treats the boring protections as part of the feature, and knows when a security measure is theatre.
- Compliance-aware product. Builds in regulated categories knowing which claims are financial promotions and which words quietly create liability.
- Subscription products. Runs the whole subscription lifecycle: acquisition, billing, entitlement, retention and the churn defence.
- Automation. Removes repeated manual work by encoding the process, then puts a guardrail where the process could do damage.
- Analytics instrumentation. Instruments a product so the numbers are trustworthy before anyone is asked to make a decision from them.
- Technical SEO. Treats crawlability as an architectural decision, not a plugin installed at the end.
Technologies
- Languages & runtimes
- Python · JavaScript · TypeScript · Node.js · MQL5 / MQL4 · Markdown
- Backend & data
- FastAPI · MongoDB · REST APIs · WebSockets · Microsoft SignalR · pandas · openpyxl · pdfplumber · reportlab · BeautifulSoup · lxml
- Frontend
- React · Next.js · Astro · Tailwind CSS · Radix UI · shadcn/ui · Framer Motion · Lenis · Recharts · i18next · Canvas 2D · SVG
- Trading & market infrastructure
- MetaTrader 4 / 5 · Manager API · MetaAPI · CopyFactory · TradingView · Third-party execution venues
- Payments & billing
- Stripe · Alternative payment rails · RevenueCat
- Auth & security
- JWT · Argon2 · bcrypt · Google OAuth · Web Crypto API · Rate limiting · injection guards
- Email, comms & analytics
- Transactional email platforms · Directory-service mail API · GA4 · tag manager · Server-side conversions APIs · Search API
- AI & knowledge systems
- Claude · Agent runtime · Graph index · Markdown knowledge base · Agent skills & rules · Context engineering
- Infrastructure & tooling
- Git · GitHub · Docker · Compose · Linux · WSL2 · Process supervision · uvicorn · CDN · DNS · S3-compatible storage · PWA
Education
University of the Arts London
2006 – 2009
Graphic design · Visual communication · Branding · Typography · User experience · Strategic design
Languages
English — Native / bilingual · Greek — Professional spoken · Cypriot Greek