Over the last twelve years I've built software across five companies (after a few years working in recording studios before that). My background is in frontend, though these days I'm just as comfortable shipping backend, mobile, or data work. If you just want the traditional CV, here's the two-page PDF.
Senior Software Engineer
Pexels is Canva's free stock photo and video platform. I was hired to work on the web frontend, and over five and a half years my remit grew until I was leading some of the team's biggest projects across web, backend, mobile, and data.
- Led delivery of the 2025 engineering programme focused on bringing Pexels users into Canva. That included a dual "Download / Edit in Canva" button on grid tiles (which lifted daily click-through by 45% on its own), Canva-branded inline ads rolled out globally in 18 languages, a custom right-click context menu, and deep links that drop the selected photo or video straight into Canva's editor. We ran every change as a controlled A/B test with strict guardrail metrics, finished the half well ahead of target, and roughly tripled monthly Canva sign-ups coming from Pexels.
- Scoped, architected, and built most of The Level Up, Pexels' first photography course (and the first project our engineering and marketing teams ran together). I built the Rails data models and API for enrolment and progress, progressive episode unlocking, and a video player with chapters, playback resume, and localised captions. I also put together two automated pipelines behind it: one encoding source video for the web, and another using Whisper and AI translation to generate captions in 27 languages.
- Stepped in to fix our frontend production reliability when the Next.js servers were a recurring source of outages. Despite being new to Kubernetes at the time, I load-tested and restructured the server fleet (cutting memory per process by 65%) and later designed readiness and route pre-warming health checks that dropped peak response times during deploys by 71%. The frontend went from a regular cause of incidents to rock solid.
- Designed and built our in-house A/B testing framework when Google Optimize was shut down. It assigns variants at the edge in Cloudflare Workers with per-variant caching, supports server-side experiments the old tooling couldn't run, and handles concurrent experiments and country targeting. I also wrote the documentation the team still relies on to set up and run tests.
- Led the migration to schema-validated analytics events on Snowplow and Iglu, building a single type-safe schema package shared between web and mobile. We ran the old and new tracking in parallel during the transition, and I tracked down the root cause of every data discrepancy before we switched over.
- Built our contributor recognition features end to end, including the Winners Wall (which quickly became a favourite page among contributors) and the backend data model, schema migrations, and production backfills behind profile achievements. Rather than style the dark UI as a one-off, I built a reusable theming system that we used again weeks later for The Level Up.
- Helped drive AI adoption across the team, starting with a March 2025 write-up that kicked off the conversation at Pexels and drew engineers from across Canva. I ran weekly knowledge-sharing sessions, built the frontend repo's agent configuration on the open AGENTS.md and SKILL.md standards (since adopted across the other Pexels repos), and coached our product designer through shipping his first pull request.
- Shipped around 840 pull requests across our frontend (Next.js, React), backend (Rails), mobile (React Native), and edge (Cloudflare Workers) codebases, and ran the mobile app releases.
Lead Front End Engineer
I was the sole frontend engineer at an Internet of Things startup for three years, owning and building the platform's Angular application end to end.
- Built a visual, drag-and-drop code editor on Google Blockly so beginners could program IoT devices without writing code. Custom blocks generated Arduino code in real time, which could then be compiled and flashed to a device straight from the browser.
- Built the occupancy analytics product, pairing a real-time and historical dashboard (fed by Wia's people-counting sensors) with a Space Designer tool where users uploaded floor plans and drew measurement zones on an HTML canvas.
Front End Web Developer
In-house frontend developer for Ireland's student travel company, building public websites, campaign pages, and booking flows alongside design and marketing.
- Designed and built the page template powering hundreds of adventure-tour packages, featuring an interactive itinerary map built with Mapbox GL and programmatic Vimeo header videos.
Front End Developer & Designer
Built and designed websites for a range of clients after an internship at Plugmedia covering UI design, mockups, branding, Joomla, and PHP for the agency's own rebrand and site.
Audio Engineer
Worked as a recording engineer and music producer in Dublin studios during and after college, before running my own online mastering business.
Education
- Diploma in Sound Engineering & Music Production, Sound Training Centre, Dublin2010 – 2012