Mark Coleman

Mark has spent the last three decades in senior software engineering — Ruby on the calm days, whatever the problem needed on the noisy ones. He founded Axonomic Labs in mid-2025 to run the practice he wanted: practitioner-led, honest about what AI is good at, honest about what it isn’t, with the same person on the discovery call and in the code review.

Immediately before Axonomic, he led the design and delivery of agentic systems and LLM integrations in production inside a London-based enterprise AI company. His remit spanned an architecture team, a 125-strong engineering organisation, a specialisation model for architects, and the introduction of AI-powered workflows into code review, customer hand-over, and pre-sales technical validation. The foundational agentic-AI library his team built became a core differentiator in the firm’s customer offer.

Before that, seventeen years as director and founder of his own technology consultancy, Breakthrough Workshop — bespoke Rails builds, AI-driven trading systems for hedge fund clients, and the day-to-day of running a small practice through changing markets. He organised the Rails Underground conference in London over that period, and still reads Ruby the way some people read novels.

Earlier career at Fidelity Investments (1996–2005) culminated in the delivery of Fidelity’s inaugural Fund Supermarket at the head of a 120-engineer programme, with a run through enterprise security architecture on the way. In between, a stint as CTO for a white-labeled music streaming service and a senior Ruby architect role on a regulated mobile payments platform.

He read Computer Science at Warwick and stayed on for two years of postgraduate research in neural networks and genetic algorithms applied to financial-derivatives market prediction — a full decade before the current wave of practitioners discovered either. The through-line has stayed consistent: use whatever technique the problem actually needs, measure what you shipped, and don’t confuse activity with progress.

Before founding Axonomic Labs, Mark led the design and delivery of agentic systems and LLM integrations in production inside a London-based enterprise AI company — mentoring a team of technical architects and driving the integration of AI tooling across a 125-strong engineering organisation.