Alex Bristow

Front end engineer with 7+ years of experience turning complex ideas into simple, usable products.

London, United Kingdom, GMT

AB

About

Front end engineer with 7+ years of experience creating products end to end, from shaping ideas and designing workflows through to building, launching, and scaling them in production. I've led technical initiatives, mentored engineers, and delivered internal platforms at NBCUniversal, Sky, and Ocado that are used by thousands of employees and millions of customers every day. My focus is always on building software that is fast, reliable, and genuinely useful.

Work Experience

NBCUniversal
Current

2023 - Present

Senior Front End Developer

  • Led development of an internal GenAI platform, taking ownership of front end delivery while also coordinating backend engineers and SREs. Established the roadmap, defined technical architecture, and guided cross-discipline work to bring the product to life.
  • Achieved a 90%+ helpful response rate, significantly above industry benchmarks, driving adoption across operational teams and support for wider rollout.
  • Built the Alerting Gateway portal, consolidating critical system alerts into a single UI for hundreds of teams and replacing unreliable legacy systems.
  • Mentored and set technical standards for a team of 3 front end engineers, improving quality and consistency across the codebase.
  • Deliver internal platforms that are as reliable and polished as consumer-facing products.

Ocado

2022 - 2023

Senior Software Engineer

  • Engineered core features for the Ocado eCommerce platform, ensuring performance, accessibility, and reliability at scale for millions of customers worldwide.
  • Led development of the 'Recipes' feature across all Ocado Smart Platform retailers, designed with SEO, accessibility, and internationalisation best practices.
  • Orchestrated the platform-wide migration from Universal Analytics to GA4, avoiding compliance risks and expanding the measurement footprint with zero downtime.
  • Provided mentoring, code reviews, and technical guidance for front end engineers, collaborating closely with designers, product managers, and stakeholders.

Sky

2018 - 2021

Front End Developer → Senior Front End Developer

  • Developed observability dashboards and mobile apps that gave Sky and NBCU executive leadership real-time insights into customer experience and streaming performance.
  • Led front end development of a web and React Native app used by hundreds of employees to monitor viewership and video quality in real-time, supporting the launches of Peacock, Sky Glass, and SkyShowtime.
  • Created a React boilerplate adopted by dozens of teams and used as the foundation for early-careers training, saving significant engineering time across the organisation.
  • Acted as product owner within a cross-functional team, aligning stakeholders and driving delivery of high-impact tools.

SPAR UK

2014 - 2018

Graduate Buyer → Trading Manager

Before working as a software engineer, I had a career in food retail buying.

  • Negotiated trading terms and cost prices for all snacking categories worth ~£120m in retail sales.
  • Delivered seven-figure cost savings and launched dozens of SPAR own-label products.
  • Managed and mentored direct reports.
  • Began learning web development by creating internal tools to improve buying processes, which ultimately led to a career change.

Education

University of the West of England, Bristol

2011 - 2014
BA Business Studies

Skills

  • JavaScript
  • TypeScript
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • React
  • Next.js
  • React Native
  • Expo
  • Tailwind
  • Styled Components
  • React Query/SWR
  • Redux
  • Node
  • Express
  • GraphQL
  • tRPC
  • PostgreSQL
  • Prisma
  • Drizzle ORM
  • Firebase
  • Jest
  • Testing Library
  • Git
  • Webpack
  • Figma
  • A11y
  • WebSockets

Personal Projects

PersonaGen

An API that generates statistically grounded synthetic personas, built for developers testing LLM workflows.

  • TypeScript
  • Next.js (app)
  • PostgreSQL
  • Tailwind
  • Better Auth
  • Nextra
  • Bun
  • Elysia
  • Drizzle ORM
  • OpenRouter
  • Railway

Draftastic

A web app for fast, fair team drafting, designed to create balanced teams effortlessly.

  • TypeScript
  • Next.js (app)
  • PostgreSQL
  • Tailwind
  • Prisma
  • tRPC
  • shadcn/ui
  • WebSockets

Professions.gg

A tool for World of Warcraft: Classic players to efficiently level professions, used by thousands of players worldwide.

  • TypeScript
  • Next.js (pages)
  • PostgreSQL
  • Tailwind
  • Prisma
  • Apify