Founder & Managing Director | WYRM
James Reed.
Engineering director with a decade of MEP delivery, including four-plus years running JPA M&E Consultants Group. Delivery spans Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Defence frameworks, residential developments, banking estates, hospitality, and a Tier 1 tech sector engagement, totalling 544 projects. Now Founder and Managing Director of WYRM, building the agent systems, calculation engines, and software architecture behind WYRM MEP and WYRM Data.
Executive summary
Founder and Managing Director of WYRM, following four-plus years as Project Director at JPA M&E Consultants, a UK building services practice run alongside a business partner across bidding, contract negotiation, design assurance, compliance, dispute resolution, and P&L. The automation programme there addressed the workload every regulated practice carries: repeated calculation, specification, scheduling, and reporting, freeing engineering capacity for design judgement. Over the period gross margin moved from 30% to over 70% and the delivery team settled at four engineers sustaining ~£1m turnover. WYRM turns that thesis into product: WYRM MEP, an on-premise agentic coordinator for building services consultancies now in paid pilot, and WYRM Data, which plans and prices AI infrastructure and generates the Revit model to build it. A concurrent Technical Director consultancy with Smith Design Engineering covers automation of delivery and the practice's expansion into England.
544
Projects won, designed, or directed
30 → 70%
JPA gross margin
17 → 4
Engineers, ~£1m turnover
424
Production C# files, AutoCAD–Revit bridge
Capabilities
Leadership and commercial
P&L ownership, framework wins and delivery, commercial negotiation, technical hiring and team leadership, client and contractor engagement, and cross-functional roadmapping across engineering and software functions.
Project and programme management
Multi-project portfolio delivery, framework agreements, RIBA-aligned stage gates, risk and change control, contract administration, and dispute resolution across public sector and private commercial work.
AI strategy and in-house LLM deployment
Agent orchestration, MCP tooling, retrieval-augmented generation, structured-output validation, and deterministic versus generative architecture patterns for regulated environments.
Construction design automation
RIBA Stages 0–7, BIM workflows aligned to ISO 19650, compliance with British Standards, CIBSE guidance, and UK Building Regulations. Uniclass and NRM2 classification, IFC and COBie data exchange.
Software architecture
Service architecture and delivery across backend (Python / FastAPI, C# / .NET 8/10, WPF), frontend (TypeScript / React / Next.js), and data (SQL / Postgres). REST and event-driven patterns, test-driven, containerised, CI/CD.
MEP engineering
Compliance, design, management, and sustainability across heating, cooling, drainage, ventilation, water, gas, LV and HV electrical, lighting, data, and fire systems. Thermal modelling to CIBSE TM52 and TM59, Part L compliance via SAP and SBEM, heat networks to CIBSE CP1.
Data and infrastructure
Production data platforms on Postgres / Supabase with row-level security, Redis caching, and vector stores for retrieval. Container deployments via Docker, Railway, and Vercel; CI/CD through GitHub Actions; WebSocket streams and structured observability across services.
Modelling, geospatial, and 3D
Drawing and model exchange across AutoCAD, Revit, and IFC. Thermal modelling in IES VE, electrical compliance in Amtech, lighting design in Dialux / Relux. Geospatial and 3D workflows including CesiumJS, MapLibre, LiDAR point-cloud processing, and 3D Gaussian Splatting.
Experience
Founder & Managing Director
·WYRMCurrentJun 2026 — present · United Kingdom
Founded WYRM and moved to it full time in June 2026. The company builds agentic software for regulated industries, and the two lines that carry it are WYRM MEP and WYRM Data. The role covers the whole business: technical architecture and roadmap, hiring, pricing and unit economics, contracts, P&L, and client delivery.
WYRM MEP is an on-premise agentic coordinator for building services consultancies. It sits above the existing Revit, AutoCAD, and analysis stack, ingests drawings and models, computes the design from first principles, and writes specifications, schedules, and cited QA back out. Every figure carries a standards citation, a solver provenance, and an audit hash, and no client data leaves the appliance. The engineering centre of it is a cross-discipline impact graph: change a ventilation rate and the platform traces the ripple through plant, cable, and board, recomputing what it can prove and flagging what an engineer needs to revalidate. Underneath sit the calculation engines, rebuilt from the published standards across dynamic thermal, daylight, electrical, and public health, each carrying its own validation ladder against the established tool in that discipline. It is in paid pilot, scoped by deliverable type against a 30% engineer-hour reduction target, with a second client engaged since. Client names are available on request under NDA.
WYRM Data plans, prices, and procures AI infrastructure in one workspace: workload in, rack design out, then a live Revit MEP model generated against manufacturer clearances, with auto-routed pipework and clash detection on the output. Procurement, cyber, legal, and healthcare lines run alongside on the same agent and intelligence stack.
Technical Director (Consulting)
·Smith Design EngineeringCurrentJun 2026 — present · Scotland
Concurrent consulting role held alongside WYRM. SDE is a Scottish building services practice, and the brief has two halves: streamline and automate how the work gets done, and take the business into England.
On the technical side that means taking the delivery process apart and rebuilding it: standardising calculation and specification workflows, removing the repeated manual steps between design, schedule, and issue, and putting tooling where the engineer hours actually go. On the commercial side it means standing up the English operation, covering market entry, positioning, and the framework and client relationships needed to win work there while the Scottish practice keeps running.
Co-Founder & Director
·Adelphos AIJan 2026 — Jun 2026 · Dublin
Technical co-founder alongside two business partners. Responsible for platform architecture, AI and automation strategy, the drone and LiDAR surveying pipeline, and the Spec Builder / Compliance engine that productised the JPA automation IP for the wider AEC sector. Set financial and strategic direction including budgeting, cash runway, pricing, and unit economics. Ran investor relations: pitch narrative, data room, technical due diligence preparation, and ongoing reporting. Market strategy, partnership development, engineering hiring, and the technology roadmap also sat here.
Pre-seed engagement ran across MEP consultancies, contractors, and surveying practices ahead of a seed raise, an early signal that the deterministic-spec and BIM-to-compliance approach landed with the sector it was built for. Stepped away in June 2026 to build WYRM full time.
Project Director
·JPA M&E Consultants GroupApr 2022 — Jun 2026 · United Kingdom
Four-plus years running the practice end-to-end alongside my business partner: bidding, contract negotiation, design assurance, compliance, dispute resolution, and P&L. Co-designed and operationalised the automation programme that underpinned delivery, including a bidirectional AutoCAD–Revit data bridge across 424 C# files and the Spec Builder rule engine. Over the period gross margin moved from 30% to over 70% and the delivery team settled at four engineers sustaining ~£1m turnover. Frameworks delivered for a Tier 1 tech sector client (NDA), Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Defence, Willmott Dixon, LJJ, Fit Out UK, and others.
Senior Automation Engineer
·GleedsFeb 2022 — Aug 2022 · United Kingdom
Worked with the in-house development team and external partners to improve engineer and surveyor workflows. Developed mobile-to-central system compatibility for field engineers, enabling data capture and synchronisation with the firm's central information models. This in turn produced automated EPC estimates, condition reports, and RIBA Stage 2 loading calculations that were transposed to automated plant selection schedules.
Senior Mechanical Engineer
·Kinetic Engineers LtdMar 2021 — Feb 2022 · United Kingdom
Mechanical engineering design across commercial fit-outs and residential developments. Heating, cooling, ventilation, hot and cold water, drainage, and gas systems to UK Building Regulations and CIBSE guidance. Team management and client-facing responsibilities: chaired technical design reviews, coordinated across MEP disciplines and with architects, and mentored junior engineers through to issued drawing stage.
Mechanical Design Engineer
·Wilson Gray Consulting LtdOct 2015 — Mar 2021 · Newcastle upon Tyne
Five and a half years of foundational mechanical design across heating, cooling, ventilation, drainage, and hot/cold water systems. Project mix spanned residential developments, education, healthcare, and mixed-use commercial schemes. Calculations to CIBSE Guide A, ventilation to Part F, energy compliance via SAP and SBEM. Scope grew from junior design tasks into leading project workstreams during the period, including site visits, contractor coordination, and client-facing design reviews.