Damien Allison

Damien founded Baack to give growing teams the content, workflow and customer platform that large companies build for themselves: API-first for developers, editable on the page by everyone else, with security and reliability handled for them.

Damien joined Meta at the start of COVID to build tools for frontline workers on Workplace. As the team's staff software engineer he grew it from 5 to more than 40 people alongside his peer manager, and led integrations with some of the world's largest brands so their frontline staff — people without company email, often up to 60% of a service business's workforce — could be reached at all. At that scale, API-first stops being a nice idea and becomes the price of entry: he saw API investment make or break integrations behind nine-figure deals. He became Workplace's privacy and compliance lead, then Meta's company-wide technical lead for privacy and compliance evaluation, working across all of its major product teams.

When Workplace was wound down he moved to lead Meta's API Platform team in London, responsible for the platform behind GraphQL and the Graph API and for Meta's company-wide webhooks infrastructure, handling trillions of requests a day. He improved webhook delivery reliability by single-digit percentage points — at hundreds of billions of delivery attempts a day, a profound change, and the first project in years to win leadership sponsorship. Seconded to the launch of Threads, a company-level priority, he was the primary committer for a new infrastructure approach that became the standard for re-engineering webhooks across Meta.

Returning to Google as a developer advocate, after his first tour in Google Research, Damien started on the Google Ads API, working with the integrations of the world's largest advertisers, whose ad trafficking ran entirely through the API, then worked across Android, Google Play, on-device machine learning and the web (AMP) to help apps and sites get faster.

Developer advocacy sits between business goals and the developers who deliver them, which is the bridge Baack is built on: one platform that marketing teams can own and developers enjoy building with.

Damien was technical lead contractor on the tooling for Klarna's expansion from Europe into the US, on a novel off-the-shelf banking platform, owning the scaling, execution plan and operational deployment that met its VC-funded expansion goals.

He then joined Park Technology, now Magic Stamp, as founding engineer and CTO, leading technology strategy, prototyping and hiring.

Damien co-founded Upgrade Digital to take the headless approach further: a hotel booking platform integrating Oracle Hospitality OPERA. Oracle referred the team to a six-figure annual contract to rebuild a UK national hotel chain's website in five weeks, part of the chain's investor goals before it was acquired. Upgrade Digital billed over £200,000 in its first year.

Damien joined an early-stage startup using inference for audience expansion, to learn the realities of a startup first-hand, then in 2012 founded his first company, SiteMorph: an expert-system AI that combined site crawls, Google Analytics and the Google Ads API to find growth opportunities on businesses' websites. Alongside it he productised complex attribution models for a company licensing the attribution patent.

Advising a London hotel group on rebuilding its direct online bookings, he led the digital transformation and built a headless booking API over its on-premises systems. Sites that had taken around nine months to build now took five to six weeks, with self-healing systems and no booking failures. After the rebuild the site's conversion rate rose from 0.2% to 7%, and monthly direct booking revenue grew by more than 3,900%.

As an engineer in Google Research, Damien built near real-time simulation systems: an experimentation platform that processed the media streams of the world's largest advertisers to simulate different models for crediting advertising spend across channels. That work helped shape the time-decay and position-based attribution models that Google Analytics went on to offer as alternatives to last-click attribution.

After leaving Google in 2010 he continued as a consultant to the same team, working with Gabriel Hughes and Jeffrey Oldham, and is a named inventor on Google's patent for multiple attribution models with return on ad spend.

In BT's technology research team, Damien built simulations of how internet technologies would roll out and be priced, and guidance on national infrastructure such as fibre to the cabinet for BT's board.

He championed the business case for the BT Broadband Accelerator, a faceplate invented in BT's labs that had sat unused because its value wasn't clear. Bringing researchers together, he simulated its effect on broadband speeds across the country and on support calls, and made the case to fit it whenever a customer reported an unstable connection: the saving in support costs paid for it. He also made the case for early AI in BT's call centres, ordering diagnostic questions to maximise the information each answer gives, so agents reach the cause of a customer's problem faster.

Damien's first role, a competitive placement during his MSc in System Design for Internet Applications that began as an internship, was building an agent-based system to check privacy compliance automatically. Software agents gathered signals from an enterprise's systems and tested them against invariants derived from a model of a regime such as Sarbanes-Oxley or HIPAA, reporting where policies failed.

The work was published with Siani Pearson of HP Labs, and anticipated what is now a major industry of automated compliance platforms such as Vanta.