Matt Cole

My Journey

What started as a love for building LEGO creations grew into a career of engineering systems that solve real-world problems. That same curiosity and drive to create still fuels everything I do.

One quote that's always resonated with me:

“The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.”

• 2024

  Keolis - Signalling Engineering Manager

  Adelaide, Australia - Jul 2024 - Jun 2026

  Adelaide was never meant to be permanent. It was a test. Could I land on the other side of the world, alone, in a brand new environment, and deliver? Living away from everyone I loved, building a life from scratch in a city I had never visited, while taking on one of the most technically complex railway environments I had ever encountered. There were moments of doubt. There were also moments of genuine pride. I am returning to the UK in June 2026. My biggest takeaway from this adventure is not professional. It is personal. I now know, without doubt, that I can take on any challenge I set my mind to. It turns out home was always Manchester.

  I arrived to find four significant challenges waiting. I fixed all four. Not alone, with a team that grew in capability and confidence throughout. The Asset Management Plans are the finishing touches on a body of work that will serve the network long after I have gone.

  The Signal Engineering team was rudderless. No structure, no career framework, no clear direction. I rebuilt it from the ground up, developing talent in an environment where high calibre technical resources are scarce and growing a team that is now capable, confident, and continuing to improve. Adelaide Junction, the most critical location on the network, had a safety crisis hiding in plain sight that nobody wanted to own. I commissioned an independent assessment, built the evidence, and spent eighteen months making the right people listen. The South Australian government has now acknowledged the true condition of the junction and committed to working with Keolis to address it. The Outer Harbor line was being held together by reactive maintenance and institutional knowledge that was quietly disappearing. I stabilised it, extended its life, and established a clear technology refresh pathway that gives the network time to procure and commission a modern replacement. Condition monitoring had failed four consecutive audits. I designed and implemented the Signalling Assets Condition Assessment Specification, a structured, repeatable framework that moved the network from assumption to evidence in how it understands asset condition and remaining life.

  • Signal Engineering Leadership
  • Team Development
  • Obsolescence Management
  • Asset Condition Assessment
  • Independent Technical Assurance
  • Stakeholder Engagement
  • Asset Management Planning
  • Cross-discipline Integration
  • Safety Critical Infrastructure
  • Knowledge Recapture
  • Technology Refresh
  • Government Relations
• 2022

  Amey - Technical Director

  Seconded to Manchester Metrolink - Principal Software Engineer

  Manchester, UK - Jun 2022 - Jul 2024

  Building production software systems on a live railway network.

  This role was a deliberate pivot. After years of leading engineering organisations I made a conscious decision to return to my true passion. Building things. Working as Principal Software Engineer at the UK's largest light rail network I designed and built production software systems that ran on live infrastructure. Not prototypes. Not proofs of concept. Systems that real engineers used to make real decisions.

  The Points Machine Monitoring system analysed signalling relay logs in real time, calculating transition time averages and standard deviations across every point machine on the network. A result within one standard deviation meant healthy performance. Four or more meant failure was imminent. The maintenance team could act before the network felt it. Spark was a cloud API built on AWS, designed to receive, store and expose telemetry data from edge devices anywhere on the network. Fast to deploy, simple to connect, and built to enable innovation rather than constrain it. The Metrolink Sensor Network ran on top of it. Arduino and ESP32 devices connected via cellular, monitoring track temperatures and cabinet environments in real time. The Tram Movement Correlation System linked the Tram Management System, maintenance database, and sensor network into a unified data platform. The foundation for understanding how the network actually behaves rather than how we assume it does. Not everything landed. The Planning and Access system was well built but the business did not adopt it. That story is worth reading separately in my note section: Great Solutions Can Fail.

  • Go / Node.js
  • REST API Design
  • AWS Cloud Architecture
  • IoT Edge Devices
  • Arduino / ESP32
  • Real Time Data Processing
  • Statistical Process Control
  • Log File Analysis
  • Condition Based Maintenance
  • Data Integration
  • Production Software Delivery
  • Railway Analytics
• 2020

  Amey - Technical Director

  Seconded to Manchester Metrolink - Head of Engineering and Asset Management

  Manchester - Jan 2020 - Jun 2022

  Most organisations think asset management is a software system. It is not. It is engineering done right. The computerised maintenance management system is one pillar of twelve. Understanding that distinction was the foundation of everything that followed. Taking on Engineering and Asset Management at the UK's largest light rail network meant inheriting a contractual obligation to achieve ISO 55001 accreditation and an organisation that had accumulated a decade of procedural debt through rapid expansion. The systems needed to manage that network safely and effectively simply did not exist.

  Over two years I identified, named, and built twelve functional pillars of asset management from scratch. Each one with its own policy, strategy, plans, monitoring, auditing, and compliance reporting. Together they formed a system that gave the organisation clarity, accountability, and a foundation for continuous improvement. ISO 55001 was achieved. Asset reliability improved. Decision making improved. But the most important outcome was cultural. The organisation began to understand that good asset management is not a burden imposed from outside. It is what good engineering looks like from the inside.

  The 12 Pillars programme touched every corner of the engineering department. Asset information and data governance, document management, configuration management, engineering change control, risk management, maintenance management, condition monitoring, competency management, asset renewals, planning and access, CMMS, and compliance management. Each one built deliberately, connected to the others, and designed to function beyond any one person, team, or franchise. The Asset Risk Management system introduced a structured approach to capturing asset level risks, categorising each one to tolerate, treat, transfer, or terminate. For the first time the organisation could see its risk position clearly. The Trafford Park Line extension was accepted into the maintenance regime during this period. Five and a half kilometres of new infrastructure, six stops, three substations, full OLE and signalling. Every asset registered, every maintenance regime defined. Change management was the hardest part. Great solutions can fail without the right conditions for adoption. That lesson shaped how I approach organisational change to this day and is worth reading about separately.

  • 12 Pillars of Asset Management
  • ISO 55001
  • Asset Management
  • Engineering Assurance
  • Organisational Change
  • Risk Management
  • Configuration Management
  • Competency Management
  • Asset Renewals
  • Condition Monitoring
  • Planning and Access
  • Contract Compliance
  • Legacy System Design

  These systems were not built for me. They were built to outlast me. That is the only standard worth building to.

• 2018

  Amey - Technical Director

  Seconded to Manchester Metrolink - Head of Digital, Signalling & Telecommunications

  Manchester - Mar 2018 - Jan 2020

  Signalling is often described as the dark arts. A secretive discipline, traditionally closed to outsiders, where knowledge passes from mentor to apprentice. I was handed leadership of a newly formed Digital, Signalling and Telecommunications team with no signalling background, five organisations worth of people who had never worked together, and a network that was averaging twenty-five service affecting failures every week. I had no right to succeed. I did anyway.

  Within twelve months service affecting failures dropped from twenty-five per week to two. The team that delivered that improvement went on to keep improving after I moved on. They built the best maintenance schedule on the network, planning heavy maintenance around seasons, avoiding the dead of winter, thinking ahead in a way that had never happened before. I was recently told that in the nine years since the team was formed, three people have left. In a high turnover industry, in a technically demanding discipline, three people in nine years. That says more about what was built than any KPI ever could.

  The first job was structure. Five organisations TUPE'd into one, operating to different standards, different contracts, different cultures. I wrote the business case, secured the funding, and built a new organisational model from scratch. A 24/7 roster, north and south teams, a clear division between maintenance and engineering, and a dedicated engineering team focused on assurance and root cause analysis. I will be honest. I was a bulldozer. The reorganisation got done and it created something brilliant. But reflection shows I did not always take every personal story into account. That lesson has stayed with me and shaped how I approach organisational change to this day. Technical credibility had to be earned. I researched relentlessly, asked questions without embarrassment, and showed genuine care for the people who knew more than me. The team noticed, trust followed, and once the team trusted the leader the rest became possible. The maintenance specifications built during this period gave the department its first structured, evidenced approach to maintaining every system in its care. Better records, better trending, better decisions. The foundation that made everything else possible.

  • High Performing Team
  • TUPE and Organisational Change
  • Signalling and Telecommunications
  • Maintenance Specification
  • Technical Leadership
  • Service Reliability Improvement
  • 24/7 Operations
  • Team Retention and Culture
  • Obsolescence Management
  • Engineering Assurance
  • Root Cause Analysis
  • Stakeholder Management

  Trust, fairness, and honesty are more important than remuneration packages and benefits. By listening to the team and delivering milestones in the order they wanted, I earned their trust. Everything else followed from that.

• 2016

  Amey - Project Director

  Manchester - Dec 2016 - Sep 2019

  Amey reorganised. Senior people left. A larger London team arrived with an eye on the Manchester operation and what it could offer them. Forty professionals looked around and wondered if they had a future. I was handed the keys and told to make it work.

  We not only survived, we won. Margin grew from 15% to 45%. Utilisation averaged 85% month on month. The Manchester team competed with their London counterparts and delivered. Not by being absorbed. By being better. It was the most commercially pressurised environment I had ever operated in. Clever people, big margins, and a relentless need to win work to feed the utilisation machine. I was in over my head. I swam.

  The first job was belief. Forty people needed to know their leader was not going anywhere and that the team had a future worth fighting for. Weekly socials, a career path framework, structured personal development. Small things that said we are building something here, not winding something down. I stepped out of the delivery pool entirely for a period to focus on winning work. Bids, relationships, pipeline. Understanding what clients needed before they knew themselves and positioning the team to deliver it. The bid success rate improved. The work came. One of the most significant wins was High Speed 1, the railway connecting London to the Channel Tunnel. The brief was a communications technology refresh and station information systems. We bid for the consultancy rather than the implementation. A deliberate shift in how the team positioned itself. Originally worth £250k the relationship grew to over £1m by the time I left. They are still working together today. The Thames Tideway Tunnel control system had been won before the reorganisation. Thirty million pounds. London's supersewer. A twenty-five kilometre tunnel and a 4.9 billion pound capital investment. We mobilised the team, established the delivery framework, and left it in good hands. They have since delivered it. Eventually I was seconded to Manchester Metrolink. Seven days into the franchise a major failure had brought down the communications network. I led the team that stabilised, restored, and improved resilience in six weeks. We delivered on that promise.

  • Commercial Leadership
  • P&L Management
  • Bid Management
  • Consultancy
  • Team Turnaround
  • Pipeline Development
  • Client Relationships
  • Career Development Frameworks
  • High Speed Rail
  • Infrastructure Consultancy
  • Business Development
  • Organisational Resilience

  The secondment was presented as an opportunity. It was also convenient. I had become too visible in a team that was supposed to have been quietly absorbed. I was ready for the next chapter regardless of the reason.

My CV, download it here!