James Spencer Email and Phone Number

Engineering lead for the NewsKit program of work, overall responsibility for the +20 engineers in the program with principal and engineering managers reporting to me directly. Responsible for overseeing the delivery and output of: • NewsKit Design System ( https://newskit.co.uk ) an open-source multi-brand react system being utilised across News Corp• NewsKit API is a federated GraphQL API that serves as a backend for frontend providing a standardised surface upon which to develop shared features.• NewsKit Render is a rending platform built on top of Next.js that allows us to share brand agnostic features across the business without needing wholesale re-platforming projects.Work closely with other disciplines leads, defining the vision and strategy for the program of work.Participate in scaled agile framework forums for triaging and alignment of work with other programs of work throughout the organisation. Responsible for alignment and development of common standards & processes with other engineering leaders throughout the business.

Working with engineering teams across News Corp to facilitate requirements and triage requirements.Working with Product and Design to plan and prioritise work across the program.Responsible for direct line management of engineers setting development objectives, 1:1's, performance reviews.Member of hiring team filling roles in both London and Sofia.Lead engineer on both design system and render squads. Ensuring we deliver both business value and properly engineered solutions consistently.

Working in Product Platforms, building out News corps multi brand design system from it's inception. Conducted significant amounts of research into other design systems, brand's requirements, A11Y, web standard and best practices. This Product is now widely adopted across by product teams across News UK & News Corp titles.Lead engineer on both for both the component library and documentation site https://newskit.co.uk .Member of hiring team filling roles in both London and Sofia.

Line management of five engineers across different squads in the organisation. Conducting regular 1:1’s, objective setting & performance conversations.Engineering lead for growth squad focused on improving findability and recommendations across the primary e-commerce channel.Architected and lead delivery of search replatforming into AWS Elasticsearch, incorporating realtime analytics to drive relevancy.Promoting engineering best practices across the team, coding standards, IAAS, TDD, Pair programming.Working closely with product owner to refine backlog and ensure successful delivery of features.Key member of recruitment team conducting CV reviews, phone interviews, technical test evaluations and on site interviews.

Worked across several product focused teams delivering features for highly transactional Ecommerce platform used by over 5 million customers a year.Breaking legacy monolith into microservice architecture. Defining service boundaries, transition to event based architecture. Oversaw creation of several services, setup CI/CD pipelines using TeamCity, Octopus Deploy & PowerShell.Responsible for full lifecycle of software delivery; ideation, planning, AB test design, grooming, development, automated testing, QA, releases. Rapid trunk based feature development using feature toggles, TDD, ATDD, Continuous testing.Delivered Customer Image migration to cloud, utilising Azure Cloud Roles, Azure Service Bus, Azure Table Storage and Azure Blob Storage.Mentoring and pairing with other engineers.Participated in on call rota to assist with and diagnose production issues.Participated in fortnightly code Katas to focus on topics such as TDD, design patterns and refactoring legacy code.

• Full stack developer responsible for designing, delivering and maintaining mission critical systems for See. Such as: primary e-commerce platform with over 500 white label instances; Client Console for reporting, event management and content management; See Admin system for internal back office tasks.• Worked as part of an agile team actively participating in planning meetings, retrospectives and scrums. Took ownership of user stories, collaborating where required and conducting informal code reviews upon completion.• Refactored large sections of legacy codebase into clean test driven .NET code across a variety of MVC, Web API and Windows Service Applications.• Used a variety of modern front end technologies such as Angular, Gulp, SASS, Booststrap and jQuery to deliver a consistent responsive experience to users.• Developed and optimised complex PL/pgSQL functions and migration scripts in primary PostgreSQL database.

• Architected and maintained solutions for leading multinational and national brands such as TUI Group(Thomson, First Choice), Liberty Global (Virgin Media,UPC), MSD, Late Rooms, De Vere Group. • Ensured successful and robust .NET delivery in complex multi departmental projects though use of Scrum, TDD and continuous integration.• .NET solutions delivered using a variety of different technologies such as ASP.NET MVC, Web API, Web Forms, Windows Services and Web Services.• Developed high traffic, scalable systems making use latest .NET features such a TAP and Parallelisation libraries.• Assisted and mentored other developers whilst also gaining a great deal of experience from working in a cohesive environment with senior developers.

• Previous role on a full time basis having graduated university.

• Part time role providing development, support and maintenance during final year of university.

• Developed and maintained .NET solutions for a variety of clients ranging from leading global brands PwC, P&O, Medigold Health to early stage startups. • Worked on ASP.NET MVC, WEB API, and Web Forms projects using both Entity Framework and Fluent NHibernate.• Regularly met with clients to define scope and technical requirements often working to tight deadlines. • Front-end development made primarily using JQuery with JQuery UI and various plugins to produce rich interfaces, PhoneGap was used to produce mobile applications. • Assisted with general day to day IT support tasks such as phone system maintenance, networking maintenance and assisting colleagues with general IT issues.