Kai Spencer

Full Stack Engineer with a passion for Web Development and Open Source.

Leeds, UK, GMT

LinkedInX
KS

Work Experience

Volume Payments Limited

March 2024 - Present
Senior Software Engineer
Frontend Development Lead
  • Technical lead for frontend development, responsible for all frontend development and maintenance of the web based SDKs, Web Applications and Native SDKs.
  • Manage the build, deployment and release of all SDKs and Applications, ensuring five nines of availibilty.
  • Hands on approach working closely with the customer success team to build and iterate on features, driven by our users.
  • Provide on-call support across the entire frontend, backend and infrastructure stack.
  • Configure and maintain Pulumi Infrastructure as Code scripts to provision backend Kotlin services and AWS resources.
  • Work closely with designers to iterate and refine designs, ensuring a consistent user experience across all products.
AWS
Vercel
NextJS
Typescript
React
Node.js
Github Actions
SDK Development
Turborepo

NHS England (Formerly NHS Digital)

2019 - March 2024
Developer (SEP 2021 - March 2024)
DPS Portal - File ingestion platform
  • Introduce and improve implementation of practices defined in the NHS Software Engineering Quality Framework such as adding automated UI testing, Security practices and Structured Code
  • Propose and implement architecture improvement of cross account microservice data transfer, building in idempotency with a new robust event driven model
  • Implement a user suggestions board to bring user feature requests and bug reports directly to the team in an Agile way
  • Spearhead migration of legacy Angular application to React reducing code footprint by 40%
  • Support Junior and Apprentice memebers of the Agile team with regular check-in's, mentorship, organisation of weekly Code Kata sessions to aid their development
Junior Developer (AUG 2021 - SEP 2021) Apprentice Developer (SEP 2019 - AUG 2021)
Digital transformation of Screening Technology - Cervical Screening Interim Solution
  • Cloud Native replacement of legacy National Cervical Cancer Call/Recall on-prem system
  • Development team member from the discovery phase of the project
  • Setup and configured Ephemeral CI/CD environment setup still in use by team of 50 developers
  • Data migration pipeline to ingest over 70m records across 87 Database instances
  • Implemented security posture analysis tools such as Scoutsuite to the CI/CD
AWS
Serverless
Terraform
React
Typescript
Python
TDD
Cucumber
Gitlab CI/CD

Open Source

NHSUK React Components

2020 - Present

Co-lead maintainer (4000 Weekly downloads)

  • React library implementation of NHS.UK frontend, used widely across the NHS.
  • Resonsible for feature development, bug fixes, and release management aligning with NHS.UK frontend releases.
  • Maintaining complex type level Typescript definitions, testing, bundling, documentation and publishing.
React
Typescript
NPM
Storybook
Jest
Github Actions
CI/CD

Education

University of Roehampton

2019 - 2023
BSc (Hons) Digital & Technology Solutions (Software Engineering)
First Class Honours

Greenhead College

2015 - 2017
Maths (C), Physics (C), Chemistry (C), Biology (B - AS Level)

Rastrick High School

2011 - 2015
Music (A*), ICT (A*), Maths (A), English Language (A), Geography (A), Chemistry (A), Physics (A), Biology (A), English Literature (B), French (C), Religious Studies (C)

Projects

ECommerce Automation Platform

Frontend application to manage personalised ECommerce order designs, backend processing of orders, and integration with third party APIs seamlessly. Maintain a high availability service with 99.99% uptime.

Consultancy
TypeScript
Next.js
GCP
Serverless
High Availability

SMS OpenAI Chatbot

Interactive SMS chatbot using OpenAI's GPT-4 API to generate responses to user input. Deployed on Cloudflare Workers & Vercel, with a MySQL database to store user data and handle message queueing.

Hobby Project
TypeScript
Next.js
MySQL
Vercel
Cloudflare Workers
Twilio SMS

React Trello TS

Typescript port of the react-trello library, used to create Trello style kanban boards.

Side Project
TypeScript
Storybook
React
Jest
SemVer
CI/CD

NHSUK React Components

React library implementation of NHS.UK frontend, used widely across the NHS.

Side Project
TypeScript
Storybook
React
SemVer
CI/CD