Anthony Forster, Lead Platform Engineer: From PSP Homebrew to Enterprise AI Platforms

When I was 14 years old, the PlayStation Portable launched in the UK. While most kids were focused on playing the games, I was fascinated by understanding exactly how they worked. I found an online game hacking community, which was totally legal, where I learned to modify the mechanisms within the games themselves. Before long, I progressed to writing MIPS assembly routines and building interfaces in C that allowed users to toggle different cheat codes on and off.

It was my first experience with programming, and I found it entirely addictive. That early interest led me to study computer science at university and pursue engineering as a career. It forged a mindset defined by curiosity, persistence, and a refusal to take the status quo at face value. Today, almost nine years into my career at GlobalLogic, I am a Lead Platform Engineer based in London, architecting the foundational systems that allow a major British multinational bank to safely pioneer generative AI.

When I step away from the laptop, I enjoy traveling, reading, and exploring London’s amazing food scene. I am a big foodie and I am always looking for somewhere new to try. I also have a deep interest in investing, economics, and Bitcoin. These outside passions heavily influence my leadership style. They have taught me to think long term rather than optimize for a quick win.

The Project & Human Impact

For the past 16 months, I have been embedded with my client building a Kubernetes based internal developer platform powered by AWS EKS, Istio, Argo CD, Backstage, and Coder. This platform serves a critical business function. It gives data science and AI engineering teams a safe, rapid way to prototype agentic applications using controlled access to production data.

Our goal is simple: teams should focus more on solving the problem and less on assembling the platform around it.

By building approved “golden paths” for agentic applications, my team and I are transforming how the bank innovates. Soon, engineers will be able to provision a fully configured cloud development environment with a single click, complete with the organization’s approved tools, MCP servers, and deployment patterns. By accelerating the safe experimentation of real data, this platform provides the foundation that makes it easier to explore where AI technologies can create meaningful value for both colleagues and customers.

Achievements & The Drive to Learn

Building cutting edge platforms in a highly regulated environment rarely comes without friction. During the early development of our platform, we encountered a localized but stubborn issue where some applications would randomly start returning Nginx 503 errors after running perfectly for days, with no obvious pattern in timing or location.

I spent a significant amount of time investigating the problem alongside another technical lead. Eventually, through a lot of patience and the same investigative persistence I used to decode PSP games years prior, we discovered a hidden caching issue. Nginx was holding onto IP addresses that were being changed by routine AWS infrastructure updates, leaving it trying to communicate with old routing resources. Once we understood the cause, the fix was straightforward, but finding it was a major victory for our platform’s stability.

To constantly stay ahead of the curve, my drive to learn extends far beyond my working hours. Engineering is both my profession and a hobby, meaning much of my upskilling happens naturally because I am always building something. I read widely, and when I come across an interesting idea or tool, I try to reproduce it. I maintain my own internal developer platform on a personal server, my “homelab”,

Anthony sharing his technical expertise and vision for the future of engineering with a large audience.

where I host my own AI agents and experiment with tools like OpenCode and Claude Code. Especially with agentic workloads, I find that hands-on experimentation is the best way to understand not just how something works, but where it can genuinely be useful. By pushing these technologies to their limits in my own workflows, I understand their true strengths and limitations before bringing the most valuable lessons back to my client work.

Team Culture

As the only GlobalLogic employee embedded directly into my client’s platform team, I operate in a unique position. Although I am technically from outside the client organization, it doesn’t feel like it. It has become one of the most enjoyable environments I have worked in throughout my career.

I value taking ownership and getting to the heart of a problem, but I am equally comfortable questioning decisions or authority, including my own, when something doesn’t add up.

The GlobalLogic UK team balancing serious engineering with a fun game of rounders in London.

I credit this seamless integration to the client’s senior leadership, who actively protect the engineering team from the organizational noise and politics that often come with a large enterprise. That psychological safety creates an atmosphere that is technically ambitious, supportive, and genuinely fun. Through consistent delivery and hard work, I have built deep trust. This allows me to help shape both the platform and the team’s culture, making room for others to challenge assumptions.

The Future

Looking ahead, I want to do more of the same, but at a much larger scale and with greater impact. I enjoy helping individuals and organizations build modern engineering platforms, products, and teams. I want to continue working exactly at that intersection.

Over the years, I have built a broad and deep range of experience at GlobalLogic across delivery, technology, and leadership. I want to use that experience not only on individual engagements but also to help shape our global service offerings and improve how we approach delivery worldwide. The introduction of global horizontal and vertical forward deployed engineers could provide a strong vehicle for that ambition. Ultimately, I want to remain close enough to engineering to understand the details while having enough influence to help teams and organizations do their best work at scale.

Advice for Future Colleagues

If you enjoy helping people and organizations solve complex engineering problems and want to make a real impact at an enterprise scale, GlobalLogic is a great place to do it.

The nature of modern engineering organizations is changing rapidly, particularly with the emergence of AI, and nobody knows exactly where it will lead. That creates real opportunities for people with a strong point of view and the drive to explore it.

My advice is to bring curiosity, ambition, and a willingness to get involved. If you have a vision for where engineering is heading, GlobalLogic gives you the opportunity to help shape it.