James Cleveland

full stack / react native / devops

e-mail: [email protected] github: @radiosilence

Experienced polyglot engineer with a huge breadth and depth of knowledge and understanding, working in multiple languages across a wide range of commercial frontend, backend, devops, and embedded contexts. Lives for problem solving and optimising, and thrives in the challenges of the London tech startup scene.

Communicating complex technical solutions to stakeholders and fellow engineers in a way they can relate to is key to my approach—if people can't understand what's happening, the most appropriate solution is unlikely to be reached.

Passionate about having reproducible, declarative infrastructure using CI/CD and IaC (GitOps).

As a natural creative, what drives me is a job where I wake up every day and build something interesting.

Recent Work

Senior Full Stack Engineer, Fresha Jan 2025–Present

World's largest beauty & wellness marketplace: 1 billion+ appointments, 120k+ partner businesses across 120+ countries

Key Skills: GraphQL, Next.js, Elixir, TypeScript, GitHub Actions, CSS, gRPC, Protobufs, AI, Docker

• Developing features from backend Elixir microservices to gateway (GraphQL/Yoga) to frontend (TypeScript/Next.js) across consumer and business applications.
• Building complex resolvers pulling in data sources from a variety of internal APIs and microservices.
• Instrumental in delivering the customer loyalty platform – the largest B2C feature release to date.
• Managing requirements in a fast-paced environment and taking initiative to deliver high-quality work within tight deadlines.
• Coming up with creative solutions to problems unique to global marketplace scale and architecture.
• Providing technical leadership and mentorship to junior and mid-level engineers when they face complex challenges.
• Getting involved with projects at product-level to give context required for technical decision making.

Senior Full Stack Engineer, Apolitical Apr 2024–Aug 2024

Key Skills: Next.js, NestJS, React, Kubernetes, SCSS, TypeScript, JavaScript, Vite, Express

• Developed new features using Next.js and TypeScript, facilitating the migration to a new architecture.
• Created APIs and endpoints using NestJS.
• Managed legacy JS code in React frontends and Express microservices.
• Resolved issues and debugged performance of services deployed on Kubernetes.
• Enhanced and expanded existing GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines.

Senior Cloud Native Engineer, EngineerBetter Jan 2022–Jan 2024

Key Skills: AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Azure, Concourse, Python, Go, CSPM, Cloud Foundry, BOSH

• Worked with a small, elite consultancy specializing in helping companies transform their infrastructure and processes to embrace software development practices such as continuous deployment, and their software to work in a cloud native manner.
• Developed Kubernetes controllers in Go and created complex CI pipelines using Concourse, GitHub Actions, and GitLab pipelines.
• Helped transform hugely complex projects at enterprise level to become more manageable, scalable, and declarative, prioritizing reproducibility and resilience to drift over strictly GitOps based workflows.
• Implemented Cloud Security Posture Management policies across various platforms, including successfully convincing Microsoft during a Paddington office visit to add features and scope to Azure Policy tool for implementing various checks.
• Built code & deployment auditing tools using Python for enterprise clients.
• Contributed to open source projects including Kubernetes External Secrets Operator and the development of Compliance Framework, a verified CSPM auditing tool.

Lead Full Stack / Mobile Engineer, Superbike Factory (Freelance) Jan 2021–Apr 2023

Key Skills: React, AWS, TypeScript, React Native, API Gateway, AWS CDK, REST API, DynamoDB

• Built an entire internal Android app and infrastructure from scratch for bike delivery drivers, featuring job viewing, note and photo uploads, training (quizzes and videos), and customer payment functionality.
• Enjoyed having free rein of a completely greenfield project, creating something fast, efficient, and reasonably low-cost using IaC, GitOps, CDK, Lambda, DynamoDB, and API Gateway to seamlessly integrate with existing systems.
• Developed the frontend using React Native, MobX-State-Tree, and minimal AWS Amplify components.
• Created a highly integrated BitBucket Pipeline that deploys infrastructure, uses CloudFront outputs dynamically, and builds the app with zero manual configuration — everything is completely dynamic with minimal environment configuration needed.
• Audited existing infrastructure code and implemented security patches and enhancements.

Lead Developer, ROXi Jan 2020–Jan 2022

Key Skills: React, Astro, AWS, TypeScript, React Native, Java, Swift, Node.js, WebSockets

• Built several key projects from scratch including the "Companion App" in React Native, which uniquely used my approach for low latency LAN communication via a WebSocket server running on the phone — necessary due to constraints of the TV app running within a browser context.
• Implemented native WebSocket libraries for both Android (Java) and iOS (Swift) platforms as React Native modules, including work to ensure thread safety on iOS using Grand Central Dispatch.
• Created internal curation tools using MobX-State-Tree, Tailwind, and Vite for enhanced performance.
• Designed and built a statically generated eCommerce website with account servicing functionality using the then-new Astro framework (based on Vite).

Lead Frontend Developer, Sapien Interactive (Freelance) Jan 2020–Jan 2024

Key Skills: React, TypeScript, React Native, Node.js, Firebase, MobX-State-Tree, WebSockets

• Recruited by a former business partner to build the application for both a startup venture and a reboot of an earlier project using React Native and Firebase.
• Implemented MobX-State-Tree to achieve extremely high performance using observables, mutable style updates, and flows for side-effects, all with minimal boilerplate.
• Initially skeptical due to preference for explicit, functional style immutability used in Redux, but approached with open mind and successfully refactored codebase from class components to modern functional components wrapped by mobx-react observers using hooks.
• Discovered the simplicity and elegance of MobX made it worth the paradigm shift from Redux.

Senior Mobile Developer, Zopa Financial Services Jan 2018–Jan 2020

Key Skills: React, TypeScript, React Native, Redux, Zeplin, Java, Kafka, Kotlin, Swift

• Led development of the credit-card section of Zopa's app using React Native and Redux.
• Built native modules for the React Native app using Swift and Kotlin for brand new Stripe card issuing APIs.
• Learned extensively about React Native while maintaining a well-kept, up-to-date codebase that leveraged new tech like hooks as soon as feasible and appropriate.
• Ensured code quality through well-reviewed, thoroughly tested code using detox and @testing-library/react-native.
• Developed strong connections with analysts and backend developers, even fixing backend bugs, while learning financial products and requirements in depth to be more effective as an engineer.

Skills

TypeScript / JavaScript

TypeScript, Next.js, Astro, NestJS, Generics, async/await, Node.js, React Native (+ Swift/Kotlin/Java), Expo, React, Zustand, esbuild, bun, Redux, MobX-State-Tree, Flux, Immer, RxJS, Webpack, Vite, GraphQL, WebSockets, Socket.IO, ZeroMQ, Lerna, i18n, Axios, Express

Python

Typing, Django, Dataclasses, Flask, Twisted, Cython, Jinja2, Celery, pip (contributor)

Devops

Docker, Terraform, Pulumi, ArgoCD, AWS, DynamoDB, Lambda, API Gateway, S3, ELB, VPC, Security Groups, AMIs, CloudFront, Cognito, CloudFormation, CDK, SES, SQS, CloudWatch, ECS, Fargate, EC2, EFS, RDS, Lambda@Edge, IAM, Route53, OAI, Apigee, CircleCI, Concourse, Mesos, Marathon, BitBucket Pipelines, GitHub Actions, Kubernetes, GitOps, Traefik, Unikernels, NanoVM, Azure Policy, Ansible

Data

PostgreSQL, MySQL, Couchbase, MSSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Memcached, GraphQL, CouchDB

Styling

Tailwind, DaisyUI, CSS, Mobile First, Bootstrap, SASS, SCSS, LESS, Foundation, HTML5

Other Languages

Go / Golang, Kotlin, Swift, Java, C#, C++, C, x86 ASM, Qt, C30, bash, zsh, JSonnet, JSON, TOML, YAML, HCL

Misc

Git, SVN, BDD, TDD, Vagrant, Nginx, Apache, Agile, JIRA, Trello, Linux

Who is James?

I don't see programming and computers as simply a job, but part of who I am. I think the world is going through very interesting times and it will be passionate programmers and thinkers that will play an important part in shaping it. My current hobbies are photography (events, portrait, street, travel), and I'm an avid cyclist (mainly fixed, but also gravel). When I lived in Brighton I often helped out with putting on shows and DJing club nights. I enjoy going out with friends and finding new bands or other weird and wonderful things to do. I am a keen follower of current affairs, especially from a technical standpoint, and think a lot about the world and am interested by new developments politically and scientifically.

Less Recent Work

Senior Frontend Developer, On The Dot Jul 2017–Jan 2018

Key Skills: React, TypeScript, Redux, Go, Node.js, API Gateway, Apigee, Auth0

• Developed the allocation UI responsible for controllers allocating deliveries and bookings to couriers.
• Refactored entire codebase to use modern practices and patterns including Redux, redux-observable for side-effects, and React 16.
• Took ownership of the authentication framework (Auth0), authorization system (AWS Lambda and JWT), and various services for user management and automated API aggregation using Swagger, AWS API Gateway, and Apigee.

Lead Frontend Developer, SmartFocus Mar 2015–Jan 2017

Key Skills: React, AngularJS, Redux, Redis, Node.js, flux, WebSockets, Express, ZeroMQ, C++, C#, .NET, Qt

• Lead Software Engineer in the innovation and front-end teams, built and rebuilt vast amounts of frontend code and internal services.
• Architected and built three mainstay current and future products while mentoring other engineers.
• Created patterns and practices widely commended within the technical team.
• Quickly tapped into skills across database architecture, general architecture, UX and product design to solve problems and improve solutions.

Lead Frontend Developer, Bootbag Jan 2014–Jan 2015

Key Skills: React, CSS, Redux, HTML, flux, WebSockets

• Prototyped and built the frontend for a startup using ReactJS.

Technical Director, Links Creative Jan 2013–Jan 2015

Key Skills: PHP, React, AngularJS, Django, jQuery, Node.js, Linux, nginx, Express, .NET, C#

• Worked as Technical Director for a small Brighton based agency.
• Took projects from ideas in clients' heads to fully developed products using Django, AngularJS, jQuery and PHP.

Web Developer, Freelance Jan 2010–Jan 2013

Key Skills: PHP, AngularJS, Django, jQuery, Node.js, Flask, Linux, nginx, Apache

• Dropped into the deep end when moving to Brighton, rapidly learned to network, project manage, and rely on quickly improving technical skills to meet demand.