Rosie Brigham
Rosie Brigham is an experienced engineering leader, researcher, and technologist with a unique blend of technical expertise and community-building skills. Her main interests are building fantastic technological tools, AI governance, and the intersection between heritage conservation and technology. She is currently Deputy Head of Engineering at the Ministry of Justice, where she provides strategic leadership for the engineering profession.
With a background in full-stack software development and a PhD in Citizen Science, Heritage Science and Software Engineering, Rosie brings a strategic approach to developing engineering professions and communities of practice. Her career demonstrates success in leading cross-functional teams, setting technical vision, establishing professional standards, and collaboration across organisational boundaries.
Education
Rosie graduated from University College London (UCL) in 2013 with a BA degree in History of Art with Material Studies.
In 2016, she was awarded the Professor Malcolm Grant Scholarship and returned to UCL to pursue a Master of Research (MRes) in Heritage Science. Here, she was able to combine her expertise in software and web development, with her passion for history and conservation. During this period she developed the first iteration of Monument Monitor in partnership with Historic Environment Scotland, a platform that utilises visitor photographs to aid heritage sites conservation monitoring. This research has been published in the prestigious journal Angewadte Chemie (impact factor 15.3).
This work led to Rosie pursuing a PhD in Citizen Science, Heritage Science and Software Engineering, completed in September 2021. The main product of this research, an advanced AI-Driven Monument Monitor, is described in full below.
Rosie Brigham
Tech Career
After leaving university, Rosie joined the first cohort of CodeFirst: Girls, a pioneering organization established by Alice Bentinck and Matt Clifford (founders of Entreprenuer First), where she was trained in Agile and web development. She then joined Funding Circle as a technical intern training in Rails, CSS, Javascript and HTML.
Rosie subsequently joined Wool and the Gang in 2014 as a full stack web developer. As well as honing her knitting skills, she managed numerous successful projects, quickly learning different tool and technologies. Simultaneously, Rosie transitioned from CodeFirst: Girls alumni to educator, becoming a lead facilitator and teacher to deliver evening classes teaching women the basics of web development. These eight-week practical courses took students through the fundamentals of HTML, CSS & JS alongside responsive design, Git & GitHub, Agile and best programming practices. At this point she also assisted Rik Lomas in delivering the first in person ‘Learn to Code’ course which subsequently developed into SuperHi, an innovative technical education platform.
In January 2016 she purchased a one-way ticket to New Zealand and travelled across the country with her laptop, earning bread and board as a freelance web developer for small businesses lacking the necessary internal capability. During this time, Rosie travelled to Australia to work as a workshop facilitator for Decoded. After several months she settled in Wellington, NZ and joined Enspiral Dev Academy as a Lead Facilitator, where she was responsible for delivering content and mentoring students the art of programming in a 12 week intensive bootcamp.
Rosie was awarded a scholarship by UCL and left New Zealand to pursue an MRes in Heritage Science. Upon completion, she joined the development team at Soho House to enhance her skills as a ruby engineer. Rosie continued working with CodeFirst: Girls to deliver their flagship evening classes and led the development of new, interactive curriculum topics that aligned with the latest software engineering practices.
In September 2017, Rosie began a PhD at UCL to develop an AI-driven citizen science platform, building on the original version of Monument Monitor. She successfully completed her PhD in September 2021, with the research leading to the adoption of Monument Monitor across numerous UK heritage and world heritage sites. Throughout her PhD research Rosie freelanced on a number of projects, including the Voices Through Time and the spin-off Dinosaur Monitor project.
From May 2022 to May 2024, Rosie worked as a software engineer and tech lead for Laka. She led a team of engineers to design and build critical backend systems for insurance claims management, establishing technical standards across a complex microservices architecture. This role added several new programming languages to her stack, including Node.js, TypeScript and Golang. With Laka, Rosie completed her AgilePM Practitioners certification.
In May 2024, Rosie joined the Ministry of Justice as a Lead Developer, where she managed two large cross-functional teams across three critical products supporting accommodation needs of prison leavers. She took strategic lead on technical decisions, implemented structured approaches to technical debt, and co-chaired the Women in Engineering Working Group, leading initiatives to improve representation of women in technical roles across Justice Digital.
Since May 2025, Rosie has served as Deputy Head of Engineering at the Ministry of Justice, providing strategic leadership for the engineering profession across Justice Digital. Her notable achievements include authoring the Ministry of Justice AI Engineering Governance Framework, which has been published as official technical guidance and shared across government departments to inform wider policy development.
As co-chair of the Women in Engineering Working Group, she has led strategic initiatives across recruitment, retention, and outreach, helping increase representation of women in technical roles from 15% to 20% within Justice Digital's 400+ engineering professionals. Read about this work in her blog post "Six Months in - Building the Women in Engineering Working Group".
Monument Monitor
Monument Monitor is a ground-breaking research project which utilises visitors' photographs of heritage sites in their care and conservation. Founded by Rosie in 2016 during her MRes, and further developed during her PhD from 2017-2021, the project utilises machine learning and environmental modelling at participating heritage sites to help predict how they will be affected by the changing climate.
Alongside developing the project, website and branding Rosie also developed the software, machine learning models and the research methodology alongside managing a group of 20+ different stakeholders across the two partnering organisations, Historic Environment Scotland and The Institute for Sustainable Heritage.
Rosie has presented the findings of this research at a variety of conferences including DigiDoc, ICC, ACHS and ICOM-CC 2020.
Her research has been published in multiple peer-reviewed journals including Heritage Science, International Journal of Heritage Studies, and a comparative study on citizen heritage science during COVID-19. She also authored a chapter on Citizen Science for Sustainable Heritage Conservation published by Routledge, and official guidance on Citizen Science for Historic Environment Scotland. Her full PhD thesis is publicly available.
The project has been featured by Historic Environment Scotland, the National Heritage Science Forum, and CoHistoria, demonstrating its impact across the heritage conservation community.
Teaching and Outreach
Throughout her career Rosie has been a passionate advocate for getting more women into technical positions. Alongside her work with CodeFirst: Girls—where she now serves on the 2026 Tech Advisory Board—she is an active mentor, helping women advance their career through technical instruction and support. Over the years she has spoken at a variety of events sharing her experience to encourage more women into coding positions including the CodeFirst: Girls Annual Conference 2015, Stack Overflow Developers meetup, and the Digital Shoreditch Festival 2015 and London Techmakers, among others.
During her PhD she developed numerous short instructor-led courses to assist researchers with their technical skills including "Introduction to github", "Github for Researchers" and "Creating a website for your PhD project".
In 2019 she developed and ran the first Heritage Science Hackathon, designed to bring together experienced technologists with small heritage institutions that lacked technical capacity within their volunteer workforce. The event was a great success and was awarded £10,000 of follow-on impact funding from EPSRC.
During her PhD she supervised several MSC students in field of Citizen Science, Machine Learning and Machine Vision and helped develop a pioneering an MSC module on Citizen Science in Heritage. She has lectured on topics of citizen science, data science and machine vision.
Contact
Rosie is currently Deputy Head of Engineering at the Ministry of Justice. For professional inquiries, collaborations, or speaking engagements, please get in touch at rosiebrigham@gmail.com.