Cain Harland
Lead Developer
“I’ve always enjoyed solving problems. The interesting ones are where there isn’t an obvious answer, and you have to work your way towards the right solution.”
Our team: Development
Development Team
The Development Team designs, builds, and maintains the technology that powers Spiral's clinical trial infrastructure. Working closely with Product Owners, testers, and clients, they transform complex trial requirements into secure, reliable platforms that support researchers around the world.
Who is Cain?
As Lead Developer at Spiral, Cain spends plenty of time hands-on, writing code across a range of projects. But his role also extends well beyond development. He helps shape project architecture, makes key technical decisions and steers the direction of Spiral’s software as it continues to evolve.
His pathway into software wasn’t exactly planned. Growing up with a father who was deeply interested in IT meant computers were part of life long before they were commonplace. He experimented with building hardware and a little coding, but an interest in science initially led him to a Bachelor of Science in biology.
A stint as a personal trainer unexpectedly brought him back to technology. After building a website for his own business—and a few other projects—he discovered he enjoyed the process enough to return to study, initially focusing on web design. Exposure to backend development and databases quickly changed that direction.
Today, that combination of science and software is particularly useful at Spiral, helping him understand not only how to build something, but the research context behind why it needs to work that way.
What's filling Cain’s brain space right now?
Lenny’s Podcast
Lenny Rachitsky
The Perfect Predator
Steffanie Strathdee and Thomas Patterson
A Bit of Optimism
Simon Sinek
Technical Highlight
Making complex randomisation work
One area Cain is particularly proud of is Spiral’s work with different randomisation models, including the challenge of making response-adaptive randomisation work efficiently across multiple domains and strata.
It’s the kind of complex technical problem that sits right in his wheelhouse: understanding what needs to happen, working through the architecture behind it, and finding a solution that performs reliably in real-world clinical trials.
Beyond Spiral you’ll find me
Away from code, Cain is currently trying to learn guitar, enjoys diving and appreciates a good BBQ.
Two other important members of the household are Jessie, a Huntaway, and Tuhirangi, a very large cat with a fairly remarkable origin story. His son found Tuhirangi as a tiny, malnourished kitten hiding between the wheelbarrows at a hardware store. He's apparently come a long way since then.