Experience

Online4baby
• United Kingdom
• Retail
• 1 - 100 Employee
• Head of Engineering

  • Apr 2023 - Present


UK Flooring Direct

• United Kingdom
• Consumer Goods
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Head of Engineering

  • Sep 2022 - Present

  Heading up the tech function at UKFD, overseeing the development of the bespoke headless commerce platform built on Next.js and AWS, growing the development teams and internal tech capability, and aligning tech with business goals and ambition

• Software Engineering Manager

  • Sep 2021 - Sep 2022



N Brown Group

• Retail
• 700 & Above Employee

• Front End Technical Lead and Front End Development Manager

  • Jan 2021 - Sep 2021

  Supporting the re-platforming of N Brown E-commerce sites to a design system driven React, NextJS and AWS based stack, and growing the Front End Developer function into a mature, cross-cutting technical community of practice. Supporting the re-platforming of N Brown E-commerce sites to a design system driven React, NextJS and AWS based stack, and growing the Front End Developer function into a mature, cross-cutting technical community of practice.



bet365

• United Kingdom
• Gambling Facilities and Casinos
• 700 & Above Employee

• Software Development Technical Lead

  • Aug 2020 - Jan 2021

  Responsible for assisting in driving the provision of scalable, maintainable, and performant systems at Bet365, overseeing technical architecture and strategies across Bet's giant software domain. Working across several Sports teams based in Manchester mentoring and coaching code team members in and around code craftmanship techniques, building a technical and collaborative culture, and helping nurture an Agile team delivery mindset. Responsible for assisting in driving the provision of scalable, maintainable, and performant systems at Bet365, overseeing technical architecture and strategies across Bet's giant software domain. Working across several Sports teams based in Manchester mentoring and coaching code team members in and around code craftmanship techniques, building a technical and collaborative culture, and helping nurture an Agile team delivery mindset.



ao.com

• Internet Publishing
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Engineering Manager

  • Mar 2019 - Aug 2020

  I’m the Engineering manager at AO, broadly tasked with raising the Engineering and delivery bar across the whole of AO Tech. I was formerly Head of Front End; having led and grown the Front End community at AO from five developers to nearly forty developers and testers. Now I work across our entire estate of ~25 teams.My role affords me the freedom to move between high level, long term strategic engineering initiatives, to low level, team-based support and coaching. My passion is in both tech and people. I build high performance teams, tight knit development communities and help nurture positive cultural change. I have been heavily involved in AO’s transformational organizational redesign as we transition from a project to product team structure.My background is Front End, so my technical skills are heavily weighted to that side of the stack, but I am keenly interested in Back End and cloud too. I’m a strong believer in UI before API; in that the needs of the customer should guide the application architecture and not the other way around. I help teams take a holistic view of the software they produce; from well considered design, testing and observability strategies, to ensuring standards, conventions and best practices are adhered to, encouraging robustness, performance and long-term maintainability.I love spending time within teams, learning about team members and their product, helping them look for opportunities to evolve their delivery process, optimize their flow, and explore new ways of collaborating together to ship high value software faster.Currently working on building AO's Design System, microfront ends, workshopping with teams to introduce architecture decision records, and building AO's Tech Radar to visualise our tech utilisation across the estate and support teams in making responsible technology choices. Show less

• Head of Front End Development

  • Aug 2017 - Apr 2019

  Overseeing a team of ~30 developers and ~10 front end testers across the Bolton and Manchester AO offices, in a self designed matrix organisational hierarchy.Driving the engineering bar across Front End and the website; championing carefully considered decoupled architecture, best practices and conventions (code craftmanship) and nurturing a culture of discovery and experimentation in teams through Agile delivery practices.Reshaping AO's internal team structure to cross functional, product oriented squads; removing dependencies and bottlenecks for teams, and focusing on high velocity, iterative development.Created AO Initiatives - Accessibility, Automation, Data, Devices and Tooling, Internal Systems, JavaScript, Performance and Styling - small teams of Front Enders with the remit to rapidly evolve key areas across the Front End; helping raise the engineering bar of AO's Front End function and supporting a best in class user experience for AO customers. Part of AO's Leadership team voted I.T. Team of the Year at the British Computer Society Awards.Continually seeking out the next big challenge within AO. Show less

• Front End Development Manager

  • Oct 2015 - Aug 2017

  Took on a team of three developers with little to no systems, process or conventions, essentially a delivery team, and turned them into a mature, high performing Front End organisation of over twenty developers, with a culture of great comradery and FE engineering excellence.Nurtured a culture of technical development. Provided weekly coding workshops, tech challenges (all devised by myself), conducted monthly technical 121s with team members teaching JavaScript fundamentals - inheritance, scope, closure, design patterns and more, monthly hack days, weekly team meetings discussing / debating the latest tech articles etc.Managed the vetting and relations with third-party Front-End based software providers / external vendors for senior stakeholders at AO.Devised a twelve month Junior development program to upskill all our juniors and graduates in both FE and general software delivery, exposing them to all relevant AO applications, systems and processes to set them up for success at AO.Represented AO as an ambassador in the developer community at meetups and external teaching organisations including universities, selling the virtues of AO and informing people about to step into the industry about the realities of professional development to help prepare them.Successfully campaigned for Front End to be integrated within the I.T. function (Front-End was previously part of the Marketing department) by convincing them of the increased value to AO’s engineering culture, the reduction in cross departmental friction and the improved output velocity integration would provide.Helped launch the I.T. function at the new AO Manchester office (launched early 2018) and promote a similar development culture and ethos with the new personnel based there. Show less

• Javascript Developer / Front End Dev Team Lead

  • Mar 2014 - Oct 2015

  Overhauling JavaScript infrastructure removing jQuery / external dependencies and optimising performance throughout the site. Writing much of the checkout software and a multitude of flagship site features. Helping introduce React / ES201X into the desktop / tablet sites, Gulp / Webpack / Babel / Node into the development / build processes and implemented TDD wherever possible across the front end. Building in house tools / libraries to assist feature development / workflows. Tutoring / mentoring AO devs from many different teams in JavaScript, libraries, Web APIs and more. Developing JavaScript based MVT campaigns using Maxymiser / Optimizely. Became Team Lead after twelve months into the role, overseeing a team of developers working on projects geared around the central mobile / tablet and desktop journey for the AO websites (UK, Germany and Netherlands), projects centred around the brands / manufacturers sold by AO and projects geared around AO's sister sites (Boots, Next etc.). Show less



Digital and Wise

• Front End Web Developer

  • Jun 2013 - Jan 2014

  Working with a wide variety of web technologies including JavaScript, jQuery, AJAX, NodeJS, WebSockets, MongoDB, HTML5, CSS3, PHP, MySQL, .Net, for a variety of agency based projects, Working with a wide variety of web technologies including JavaScript, jQuery, AJAX, NodeJS, WebSockets, MongoDB, HTML5, CSS3, PHP, MySQL, .Net, for a variety of agency based projects,



Rhythm FX School of Music Technology

• Project Leader

  • Dec 2005 - 2009

  Music technology organisation ambassador, funding manager, organiser and tutor. Music technology organisation ambassador, funding manager, organiser and tutor.



Accrington & Rossendale College

• United Kingdom
• Education Administration Programs
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Music Technology Tutor

  • 2003 - 2005

  Head of music technology teaching from BTEC to HND level. Head of music technology teaching from BTEC to HND level.