So who am I?
I'm James King, a Software Engineer from Nottinghamshire, who has an affinity for Coca-Cola, bacon, and being pretty bad at boardgames despite my intense love of them. You want some more info? Fine...
I suppose we should talk about where I've worked. This bit might sound a little more professional...
Monzo
May 2023 - Present
Staff Software Engineer
Monzo have dived head-first into the world of Borrowing with their Overdraft, Loans, and Flex products, and the Borrowing collective has been growing at pace. I have been brought in to primarily look after the Flex product team, being a Staff Engineer to help continue rolling out new capabilities and tackle the engineering challenges associated with providing a best-in-class product.
As a long-time user of Monzo (even paying for the Premium account!) I could not be happier to join the team; terrified, but excited! With an incredibly talented team, very ambitious targets, and an unwillingness to settle for anything except that brilliant "Monzo Magic", the future of Flex is looking amazing.
Go
TypeScript
React
AWS
Keyspaces
CircleCi
GraphQL
Kubernetes
Kafka
NSQ
On Call
Deliveroo
December 2020 - May 2023
Staff Software Engineer
July 2022 - May 2023
Going from 6 engineers in Care to over 18 has necessitated the Care team grow, split, and redefine its priorities across these new teams. During my time at Deliveroo I've ended up being "Mr Agent Tooling", which I probably owe to my DVELP experience as well as just loving the problem space in general.
Having impact within and without of the Care Applications team has become more of my responsibility each day,
and being promoted to Staff Engineer is Deliveroo's way of recognising this, as well as letting me concentrate
on larger problems than the nitty-gritty of getting stuck in coding at the coal-face. Anyone who's worked with
me knows how much I love communicating, planning, and seeing a project through from its first steps to full
graduation, so this is a dream for me - 
emojis in Slack all-round.
TypeScript
JavaScript
React
Redux
Scala
Go
AWS
CircleCi
GraphQL
DataDog
Sentry
On Call
Senior Software Engineer
December 2020 - June 2022
Deliveroo have many facets to their operation, and one that's not immediately obvious to outsiders is that of "Care" - what happens after you place your order. It's an integral part of a great customer experience, and one that Deliveroo takes incredibly seriously.
I am part of the Care Engineering team, looking after these various microservices (both frontend and backend) across various languages, keeping up with the latest technology as a company at the scale of Deliveroo must do, while creating advancements at the break-neck speed that an industry leader and disruptor demands.
TypeScript
JavaScript
React
Redux
Scala
Go
AWS
CircleCi
GraphQL
DataDog
Sentry
On Call
DVELP
June 2019 - November 2020
Senior Software Engineer
DVELP is a company obsessed with creating real change in the communications space, especially around contact centres. To this end, they use Twilio and Google AI capabilities to create amazing experiences, both for contact centre agents and customers alike.
I was as a full-stack (Node/TypeScript/React) Senior Software Engineer, helping deliver client solutions through our professional services offering, as well as assisting with business functions on a day-to-day basis. I feel honoured to be included in many high-level business operations and decision making - DVELP truly is a company run by everyone it employs, not just that of some god-like "Senior Leadership Team".
I also had the responsibility of InfoSec officer for the company, meaning there's lots of "fun" forms and questionnaires to fill out on a regular basis, as well as internal and external audits.
For the last 6 months of my employment, I was also effectively acting Head of Engineering for the DVELP practice within the parent company Sabio; being involved in all facets of business delivery, including sales, support, hiring, scoping, client communications, technical direction, and actually engineering solutions.
TypeScript
JavaScript
React
Redux
GCP
InfoSec
Twilio Flex
Google Dialogflow
CircleCi
GraphQL
Delivery Management
Steve King Consulting
Feb 2019 - May 2019
Contract Software Engineer
I decided to make the move into contracting, and started working through my Dad's company Steve King Consulting, offering in-house design and development services to his existing client-base, as well as updating the main website.
During this time I got to play with a lot of new technologies, mainly centered around JAMStack, with lots of emphasis on speed and allowing handovers to clients which required little technical knowledge to maintain, using services such as Prismic to allow them an interface to update the content of their site without ever touching code.
TypeScript
JavaScript
React
Gatsby
Prismic
Gitlab CI
Sky Betting & Gaming
Nov 2015 - Jan 2019
Senior Software Engineer
Nov 2017 - Jan 2019
After 2 years and moving to the Vegas product, I applied for and received a promotion to Senior. This effectively meant my duties would involve more decision making and planning for the future of our product(s), as well as giving more guidance to junior developers. As I had grown to be a "go to" point of contact for most people outside of my squad, this promotion also recognised that status as someone to trust regarding what could/couldn't be done and in what timeframe.
I continued to write code, however more and more ended up reviewing and pairing with others to improve our code quality overall, as tech moves fast and somehow SBG moved faster! We used bleeding-edge front-end tech such as Next with React all coded in TypeScript. The back-end was being updated from PHP to Next and Node, with the pipelines all being run through Jenkins. We were also moving from a Chef-on-prem docker stack to an AWS docker stack.
TypeScript
JavaScript
React
Redux
AWS
Jenkins
Next.js
Chef
On Call
Software Engineer
Nov 2015 - Nov 2017
I was offered a job via the refer-a-friend scheme, and was placed into the Gaming tribe into the "One To Go" Squad, which is responsible for the Sky Bingo product. This is a high-performance product, which serves hundreds-of-thousands of visitors a week, and thus is built to the most rigorous of performance standards using a combination of PHP and JavaScript (React/Flux). The site is fully responsive, and the one codebase must work across all screen sizes, devices, and both an Android and iOS application.
We practice peer-code-reviews as a matter of course for all changes for the site (no matter how small), and the whole site is deployed by a continuous integration pipeline built around Jenkins; in short, the whole product is super modern, adhering to the current best coding practices.
PHP
JavaScript
React
Redux
AWS
Jenkins
Chef
Highfield ABC
Jul 2014 - Nov 2015
Software Developer
Primarily working with ASP.Net (both Visual Basic and C# components), my responsibilities included maintaining the bespoke behemoth website of highfieldabc.com. This was a huge system, that handled every part of the business, from sales, users, managing learners and courses, validation, interacting with examination systems (both in house and third party), and providing and consuming various services.
Early in my employment, I was tasked with rebuilding their Dubai site to bring it roughly in line with modern web design (an improvement from the 2006-esque look). I did this, but also created a mockup of a Bootstrap-powered responsive site and provided that alongside. The directors saw this and asked me to make this the focus of design for all the Highfield online products going forward. This has been built using Angular, leveraging ASP MVC, RESTful services, and Azure.
ASP.Net
Visual Basic
C#
JavaScript
Angular
Azure
Verizon Enterprise Solutions Group
Jul 2012 - Oct 2012
Project IT Developer - Intern analyst
I worked at Verizon as part of a 12-week internship program in the Software Development department. I was assigned to work on an extension to an existing Billing & ERP System, which used Oracle PL/SQL, a language I had never worked with before. As well as this development, I also had to quickly grasp how to use/work in UNIX, including working in vi to edit shell and perl scripts.
After this project was mostly completed, I was moved to work on a different critical system, which is used to handle the connection status of "high risk" accounts. The system front-end needed completely rewriting into Java/HTML/CSS from Flex, interacting with a different PL/SQL system. This also required me to work with the offshore team based in India, which was a learning experience for myself; after going from never having a conference call, to having a 5 hour time difference was interesting, to say the least.