JACK·ROSE

Developer Experience · Melbourne

• Technical direction, planning, and mentoring for a four-engineer team formed when Developer Experience split in two; built the team's ways of working and direction from scratch.
• Agent-ready platform work with my team: AI code review delivered through CI (2,620 reviews, enabled on every repo), a Renovate-based dependency-update system, and cross-repo uplift to a developer/agent-experience standard.
• Contributed to hiring (L2/L3, grad, AI-enablement loops); designed a new system-design interview format; mentor to early-career engineers.

Developer Experience platform

• Led the local developer environments initiative end-to-end: user interviews, RFCs, published benchmarks, an authored engineering standard, and a data-led rollout — 95 repos (~80% of active product-group work) moved to reproducible Nix/DevBox project-scoped environments.
• With my team, built and operated Hotel, an internal Go CLI, as a product: releases, office hours, support rotation, telemetry from day one; DevBox laptop setup behind a corporate proxy, private package-registry access, self-service diagnostics, and a compiled plugin architecture — 8 extensions shipped, 2 from outside the team.
• Delivered the company MCP server through Hotel: AI tooling with company context — internal packages, documentation, standards, tech radar — iterated against usage telemetry; weekly active users grew from ~10–15 to ~120–150.

Frontend delivery platform

• Driving contributor to the migration of Culture Amp's front ends to self-hosted serverless Next.js: maintained the community serverless adapter fork, CDK app-deploy stacks, and a repo template that took a new front end from scaffold to production in a day.
• Led a zero-downtime production migration of a customer-facing frontend (Feb 2023); later diagnosed and restored a pinned-version outage across deployment consumers.
• Reduced the internal analytics service's cache footprint 2 GB → 68 MB and peak process memory ~5.25 GB → ~500 MB.

React Native hypnotherapy app and TypeScript serverless web funnel (Firebase); helped prepare the codebase to support a third product.

React Native app for machine-generated, size-customisable knitting patterns. Improved the spreadsheet-backed pattern engine and built a geometry-aware engine that visualised garments as node graphs and verified patterns were knittable — implemented for some garments before the company ran out of funding.

React/TypeScript (some Elm and Ruby on Rails) on the newly acquired Performance product. Got the product working reliably behind the Great Firewall of China: bundle shrinking and splitting, a custom webpack plugin serving assets via a public-CDN mirror with SRI integrity, and instrumentation to prove it worked. Still working reliably years later.

React/Django agency work helping startups scale: an offline-first livestock sale-yard tracking PWA; museum indoor-location admin dashboards using GeoJSON; building-materials tracking via Bluetooth beacons and Raspberry Pi sensors; a shared data layer across a React Native app and website (Good on You).

First programming job (Perth): WordPress themes from scratch, Laravel/Vue work for small businesses, and bash tooling for moving WordPress sites between dev, staging, and production.

BE (Mechanical) graduate programme, then process engineer on a Melbourne site. Project-managed a $617k, 150tph sand-dredge refurbishment to completion on budget; oversaw PLC, GPS, and production-camera installation; automated reporting and plant-utilisation tooling in Excel/VBA — the work that pointed me at software.