Jane Alderton

Lead a team of six building the company's flagship analytics dashboard, which roughly 40,000 people open on most weekday mornings. Shipped a full front-end redesign with zero planned downtime (the site was quietly sad for one evening, and the team has agreed not to discuss it). Cut initial page load by 38% with caching, code-splitting, and the discipline of not adding a fifth font. Own the deploy pipeline that ships 20+ times a week; the 21st always feels different. Also responsible for on-call rotation, which I describe in interviews as “a growth opportunity with a pager”.

Built and maintained five backend services plus the customer-facing web application. Introduced TypeScript across twelve repositories and watched the bug-report inbox shrink by about a third; the remaining two-thirds were “that's a feature”, and it was not. Rewrote the reporting module previous teams had called “load-bearing”, meaning nobody had touched it since 2014 out of fear, which turned out to be a reasonable strategy. Mentored two junior engineers into solid mid-levels; one of them now uninvites me from meetings, and I count that as a success.

Worked the storefront platform at a mid-size e-commerce company: search, feature flags, a checkout flow, and a “trust us, it's a demo” modal that nobody ever clicked. Learned that most bugs live in edge cases nobody bothers to test, and that “works on my machine” is a personality trait, not a deployment strategy. Grew the test suite from twelve tests to three hundred; two hundred eighty-nine still pass, and we have made peace with the remaining eleven.

Rotated through three teams in six months: prototyped an onboarding flow that survived exactly two weeks of user testing, automated a test script nobody had run in months (it was broken in four distinct ways; I keep the screenshots), and discovered that most production incidents are a misconfigured setting with good press. Left with strong opinions about semicolons, and a sticky note that still says “ask Jane about the cron job”.