Jake Neal
Experienced Full-Stack Engineer & Technical Lead
based in Manchester, UK
About
As an experienced full-stack engineer and technical lead with over 15 years of professional experience, I bring a wealth of expertise to every project I undertake. With deep experience across TypeScript, React, Vue.js, Laravel, and cloud infrastructure (AWS, Terraform), I architect and deliver scalable B2B/B2C platforms end to end—from database design and API layers through to production front-ends.
A defining aspect of my career has been my leadership experience. I built an engineering team from the ground up, hiring and mentoring six engineers to achieve exceptional results. This hands-on leadership role sharpened my ability to foster collaboration, set engineering practices, and deliver high-quality outcomes under tight deadlines.
Whether I'm designing system architecture, shipping features to production, or leading a team, I bring a meticulous attention to detail and a focus on delivering robust, maintainable solutions.
Top Skills
- TypeScript
- React
- Next.js
- Vue.js
- AWS
- Leadership
Recent Experience
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Senior Full-Stack Developer (Contract) • EcoOnline
March 2026–Present
As a contract Senior Full-Stack Developer at EcoOnline, I work across Team Manager, a multi-tenant SaaS platform within EcoOnline's EHS product suite that provides a suite of tools for personnel and training, equipment management, and incident reporting and analytics, used by hundreds of customer organisations. The product spans a polyrepo architecture: a large PHP/MySQL core codebase that renders the main application, a newer TypeScript API, and React components embedded into PHP view files to modernise the UI incrementally. Working in two-week sprints as part of a small, focused team, I contribute across the full stack—shipping new features, hardening test coverage, and paying down years of accumulated legacy technical debt.
A major focus of my work has been integrating Team Manager with EcoOnline's new company-wide identity platform—a centralised system that models organisations, users, and authentication providers across the entire product portfolio. When a user signs into any product, they are now routed to the central platform to authenticate against their organisation's configured provider. I refactored Team Manager's authentication layer to delegate to this platform, building a provider-agnostic integration that supports SAML, OIDC, OAuth, and basic auth, including enterprise identity providers such as Microsoft Entra ID and Okta. This meant reworking legacy auth flows, token handling, and session management while preserving role-based access control (RBAC) and strict multi-tenant data isolation.
Alongside feature delivery, I have driven a significant uplift in product quality and reliability. I expanded automated test coverage across the stack—front-end unit tests (Jest), back-end unit tests (PHPUnit), and integration tests—to protect critical paths and catch regressions earlier. I have systematically worked through a large backlog of defects, many of them long-standing legacy issues, reducing the open bug count from nearly 400 to under 100. Throughout, I use AI-assisted tooling to accelerate investigation, refactoring, and delivery while maintaining code quality and architectural consistency.
Technologies used:
- AI/LLM
- AWS
- Composer
- Docker
- ESLint
- GitHub Actions
- HTML
- JWT
- Jest
- Material UI
- Multi-tenancy
- MySQL
- OAuth 2.0
- PHP
- PHPUnit
- Prettier
- RBAC
- REST APIs
- React
- Redis
- Sentry
- TypeScript
- Vite
- Zod
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UX Engineer (Contract) • Jaguar Land Rover
November 2025–April 2026 • 6 mos
As a contract UX Engineer at JLR, I'm working on a digital product passport platform initially driven by upcoming Euro 7 vehicle legislation, with the broader goal of supporting additional product passport use cases across the business.
My role sits across UX research, product design, prototyping, and front-end-aware design delivery. I'm conducting research to understand user needs, stakeholder requirements, and regulatory constraints, then translating those insights into personas, user journeys, prototypes, and high-fidelity designs. These outputs are used to align stakeholders, validate product direction, and shape the experience of a complex compliance-led digital product.
I'm also helping define the visual and interaction foundations for the product, including brand guidelines, reusable design patterns, and component alignment with Material UI. A key focus is ensuring that designs are practical to implement, consistent across screens, and created with accessibility in mind, including WCAG 2.2 AA considerations.
This role brings together my experience across UX, Figma, Material UI, accessibility, design systems, and front-end engineering, with a strong emphasis on turning ambiguous regulatory requirements into usable, scalable, and stakeholder-ready digital product experiences.
Technologies used:
- CI/CD
- ESLint
- Figma
- Material UI
- Playwright
- Prettier
- React
- React Testing Library
- Storybook
- TanStack Query
- Terraform
- TypeScript
- UX
- Vite
- Vitest
- i18n
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Lead React Developer (Contract) • Governors' Virtual Office
May 2025–January 2026 • 9 mos
As a contract Lead React Developer, I architected and delivered the rebuild of GVO's B2B web application from inception through to a production-ready MVP. I defined the full application architecture including API integration patterns, data-fetching and caching strategies (TanStack Query), client-side state management (Zustand), and schema-first validation (TanStack Form + Zod). I designed the data flow between the back-end API layer and front-end, implementing robust error handling, optimistic updates, and secure JWT-based authentication flows with role-based access control.
I leveraged AI extensively to accelerate delivery velocity, including using LLM-powered tooling throughout the development workflow. I also built an AI-driven file classification feature: when clerks attach files to meeting agenda items, the system uses contextual signals (agenda title, description, committee, and file name) to automatically suggest the correct storage location based on confidence scoring.
Working to very tight deadlines, I took the product from prototype to a production system that was successfully demoed to a prospective investor. I established the engineering practice end to end: CI/CD pipelines via GitHub Actions, automated testing strategy (unit, integration, and e2e via Playwright), code quality standards, and release processes. I made architectural decisions on state management, routing, caching invalidation, and API contract design, while defining the coding standards required to deliver a robust, scalable foundation under significant time constraints.
Technologies used:
- AI/LLM
- CI/CD
- ESLint
- GitHub Actions
- JWT
- Material UI
- OAuth 2.0
- Playwright
- Prettier
- RBAC
- REST APIs
- React
- React Testing Library
- Storybook
- Stylelint
- TanStack Form
- TanStack Query
- TanStack Router
- TypeScript
- Visual Regression Testing
- Vite
- Vitest
- Zod
- Zustand
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Senior Full-Stack Developer (Contract) • OneTwo
April 2025–October 2025 • 7 mos
As a contract Senior Full-Stack Developer, I partnered with OneTwo to modernise their stack and deliver a ground-up rebuild of a core web application. I designed and implemented the full-stack architecture using Laravel for the API and business logic layer, with Inertia.js bridging to a Vue.js + TypeScript front-end. I architected the database schema, implemented JWT-based authentication with role-based access control (RBAC), built real-time features over WebSockets (Laravel Reverb and Echo), implemented queue-driven background processing with Redis, and set up event-driven data flows for asynchronous operations.
I provisioned all infrastructure on DigitalOcean using Terraform (IaC), set up Dockerised builds for reproducible deployments, and implemented CI/CD pipelines with automated testing gates. I introduced a rigorous testing strategy spanning unit tests (Vitest, Pest), integration tests, and visual regression testing. I also coached the team on agile practices and TDD/BDD, establishing working agreements, quality gates, and engineering ceremonies to improve delivery velocity and code quality.
Technologies used:
- Bootstrap
- CI/CD
- Composer
- Design Tokens
- DigitalOcean
- Docker
- ESLint
- Event-driven Architecture
- Inertia.js
- JWT
- Laravel
- Laravel Sail
- Monorepo
- PHP
- Pest
- Pinia
- PostgreSQL
- Prettier
- RBAC
- REST APIs
- Redis
- Storybook
- Style Dictionary
- Stylelint
- Tailwind
- TanStack Form
- Terraform
- TypeScript
- Visual Regression Testing
- Vite
- Vitest
- Vue Test Utils
- Vue.js
- WebSockets
- Ziggy
- Zod
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Lead Full-Stack Developer (Contract) • The Event Verse
October 2024–January 2025 • 4 mos
As a contract Lead Full-Stack Developer, I architected and built the greenfield rebuild of a multi-tenant event management platform, designing the database schema, API layer, and deployment infrastructure from scratch. Using Laravel, I implemented the core business logic, JWT-based authentication, role-based access control (RBAC), event-driven processing, queue-driven background jobs, and RESTful API endpoints, with Inertia.js bridging to a Vue.js + Tailwind front-end for server-driven page rendering.
I deployed the platform on AWS using Laravel Vapor (serverless), leveraging Lambda for compute, SQS for queues, S3 for asset storage, and RDS for the database layer. The multi-tenant architecture ensured data isolation between clients while sharing infrastructure for cost efficiency. I set up the full project infrastructure using Terraform, wrote unit and feature tests with PestPHP to ensure reliability, and established coding standards and architectural patterns to enable the team to continue building upon the foundation I delivered.
Technologies used:
- AWS
- AWS Lambda
- Amazon RDS
- Amazon S3
- Amazon SQS
- Docker
- Event-driven Architecture
- Inertia.js
- JWT
- Laravel
- Laravel Sail
- Laravel Vapor
- Multi-tenancy
- PHP
- Pest
- Pinia
- PostgreSQL
- Prettier
- RBAC
- REST APIs
- Redis
- Tailwind
- Terraform
- TypeScript
- Vite
- Vue.js
- Ziggy
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Design Systems Specialist (Contract) • Nivoda
August 2024–December 2024 • 5 mos
As a contract Design Systems Specialist I worked with Nivoda to develop and deliver their internal design system. In this role, I was responsible for creating a comprehensive and scalable design system that ensures consistency across their digital products.
This involved collaborating closely with the design and engineering teams to establish reusable UI components, design patterns, and documentation that streamline the development process. I focused on aligning the system with brand guidelines, improving efficiency, and enhancing the overall user experience across all platforms, while ensuring the design system is flexible and adaptable for future growth.
Technologies used:
- Design Tokens
- ESLint
- Figma
- Material UI
- Monorepo
- Next.js
- Nx
- Prettier
- React
- Storybook
- Style Dictionary
- Stylelint
- TypeScript
- Visual Regression Testing
- Vite
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Front-End Developer (Contract) • Wonderful
August 2024–October 2024 • 3 mos
As a contract Front-End Developer, I worked with Wonderful to deliver a greenfield custom CRM system for one of their clients. I designed the data model and API integration layer, built data visualisation dashboards using Chart.js, and implemented complex form workflows with schema validation (VeeValidate + Zod). The system handled sensitive client data requiring careful attention to access control, data validation, and secure API communication.
I collaborated closely with the back-end team to define API contracts, implement data transformation logic, and ensure smooth system interactions. I focused on optimising performance, data integrity, and scalability, while adhering to best practices in security, accessibility, and maintainability. The CRM required integration with multiple external data sources and services to meet the client's specific business requirements.
Technologies used:
- Chart.js
- Figma
- JWT
- Laravel
- Nuxt
- PHP
- Pinia
- Prettier
- RBAC
- REST APIs
- SSR
- Tailwind
- TypeScript
- VeeValidate
- Vite
- Vue.js
- Zod
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Front-End Developer (Contract) • Astound Digital
April 2024–June 2024 • 3 mos
As a contract Front-End Developer, I worked with Astound on a significant eCommerce site rebuild for one of their key clients. I implemented a BFF (Backend-for-Frontend) layer to orchestrate data from multiple upstream services, handling API aggregation, response transformation, and caching strategies to ensure high-performance page loads across the platform.
I worked across the full stack, integrating APIs, implementing server-side rendering (SSR) for SEO and performance, and building a component library in Storybook. The architecture was designed for scalability using a monorepo structure with shared packages. I focused on optimising Core Web Vitals, ensuring accessibility compliance, and delivering a robust, high-throughput eCommerce experience within tight project timelines.
Technologies used:
- BFF
- ESLint
- JWT
- Monorepo
- Node.js
- Nuxt
- Prettier
- REST APIs
- SSR
- Storybook
- Stylelint
- Tailwind
- TypeScript
- Vite
- Vitest
- Vue Storefront
- Vue.js
- Zod
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Lead Front-End Engineer (Full-time) • YourParkingSpace
March 2021–March 2024 • 3 yrs 1 mo
As the Lead Front-End Engineer at YPS, I spearheaded the complete rebuild of the B2C marketplace platform from the ground up, taking it from prototype to a production system serving thousands of daily transactions. I also built new B2B platforms and improved existing B2B/B2B2C systems. I defined the system architecture end to end: server-side rendering with Nuxt, GraphQL API layer, serverless back-end functions on AWS Lambda, infrastructure-as-code with Terraform, and CI/CD pipelines via GitHub Actions and TeamCity. I implemented JWT-based authentication with RBAC—including customer impersonation capabilities for customer service teams—and made key architectural decisions on data flow, caching strategies, API design, and deployment topology across multiple environments.
I built and managed the front-end engineering team: running hiring loops, conducting technical interviews, delivering 1:1s, creating personal development plans, and leading performance reviews. I established the engineering practice including testing strategy (unit, component, VRT, e2e), code review standards, error tracking (Sentry), and release processes. I drove the migration of legacy monolith services to a micro-frontend architecture with shared packages in a Turborepo monorepo, improving team velocity and deployment independence.
Technologies used:
- AWS
- AWS Lambda
- Amazon S3
- Bootstrap
- BootstrapVue
- CI/CD
- CloudFront
- ESLint
- GitHub Actions
- GraphQL
- JWT
- Laravel
- Leadership
- Micro front-ends
- Monorepo
- Next.js
- Node.js
- Nuxt
- PHP
- PostgreSQL
- Prettier
- RBAC
- REST APIs
- React
- React Native
- Redis
- SSR
- Sentry
- Serverless
- Storybook
- Strapi
- Stylelint
- TeamCity
- Terraform
- Turborepo
- TypeScript
- Visual Regression Testing
- Vite
- Vitest
- Vue Test Utils
- Vue.js
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Front-End Developer (Full-time) • Mainline Menswear
June 2020–March 2021 • 10 mos
As a Front-End Developer at Mainline, I worked across both the UK and International eCommerce platforms, focusing on performance optimisation, new feature delivery, and system reliability. I partnered with Google to optimise server response times, Core Web Vitals, and overall platform performance—work that spanned back-end profiling, caching strategy changes, and database query optimisation alongside front-end improvements. I built and integrated chatbot systems, implemented automated testing frameworks, and set up Storybook for component-driven development. I also improved accessibility compliance across the platforms.
Technologies used:
- CSS
- HTML
- JavaScript
- Jenkins
- Jest
- Laravel
- MySQL
- Node.js
- Nuxt
- PHP
- REST APIs
- React
- React Native
- Redis
- SCSS
- Storybook
- Swift
- SwiftUI
- Vue Test Utils
- Vue.js
- Webpack
- WordPress
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Front-End Developer (Full-time) • Big Brand Ideas
May 2018–June 2020 • 2 yrs 2 mos
As a Front-End Developer at Big Brand Ideas, I designed and built scalable web applications for clients across multiple industries, working across the full stack with Laravel and Vue.js/React. I architected database schemas, built RESTful APIs, implemented authentication systems, and developed CMS-driven platforms using Laravel Nova and WordPress with custom plugin development. I managed the full delivery pipeline from database design through to API implementation and front-end integration, ensuring seamless data flow and robust system architecture for each client project.
Technologies used:
- Advanced Custom Fields
- CSS
- Drupal
- HTML
- JavaScript
- Jest
- Laravel
- Larevel Nova
- Magento
- MySQL
- Node.js
- Nuxt
- PHP
- REST APIs
- React
- SASS
- SCSS
- VeeValidate
- Vue.js
- Webpack
- WordPress
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Full-Stack Web Developer (Full-time) • The Garden Creative Marketing (formerly, Robot Creative)
July 2015–May 2018 • 2 yrs 11 mos
As a Full-Stack Web Developer at The Garden, I designed, built, and operated production web applications end to end. I developed custom PHP frameworks adhering to PSR-2 standards, designed MySQL database schemas, built RESTful APIs that integrated with external third-party services, and implemented authentication and session management. I built large-scale systems used by hundreds of users daily, handling data ingestion from multiple sources and complex business logic. I provisioned and maintained production Linux servers (LEMP and Node.js stacks), configured Nginx reverse proxies, managed SSL certificates, set up automated deployments, and ensured system reliability and security across all projects.
Technologies used:
- Advanced Custom Fields
- Apache
- CI/CD
- CSS
- Composer
- Express.js
- Gulp.js
- HTML
- JavaScript
- Laravel
- Linux
- MySQL
- Nginx
- Node.js
- PHP
- PostCSS
- REST APIs
- SASS
- SCSS
- Vue.js
- Webpack
- WordPress
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Full-Stack Web Developer (Full-time) • BuyAssociation
May 2011–June 2015 • 4 yrs 2 mos
As a Full-Stack Web Developer at BuyAssociation, I built and maintained the company's web platforms end to end, from database design and server-side logic through to front-end delivery. I developed a custom agents' portal with role-based access control and built an internal staff portal that aggregated data from multiple services, databases, and resources into a unified management interface. I provisioned and maintained Linux web servers (Apache/Nginx), managed MySQL databases, and handled production deployments. I worked on several bespoke data-driven projects requiring integration across multiple systems and data sources.
Technologies used:
- Advanced Custom Fields
- Apache
- Bootstrap
- CSS
- Gulp.js
- HTML
- JavaScript
- Linux
- MySQL
- Nginx
- PHP
- RBAC
- REST APIs
- SASS
- SCSS
- Webpack
- WordPress