Senior Front End Engineer
Alex Bristow
I turn complex ideas into simple, usable products.
Senior front end engineer with over 8 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.
01 / Career
Experience
Product work across internal platforms, customer experiences, and greenfield tooling.
NBCUniversal
2023 - Present
Senior Front End Developer
- Own front end for an enterprise GenAI platform - building chat interfaces, agentic workflow UIs, and automation tools that give operational teams approved access to frontier models. Led the initial build, coordinated with backend engineers and SREs to ship to production, and continue to shape product direction. First GenAI product in the business to reach production.
- Built the Alerting Gateway portal - a unified incident management UI used by hundreds of engineers and ops staff to keep tens of millions of viewers streaming across Peacock, NOW, SkyShowtime, and Showmax.
- Built a self-service platform for incident and corporate communications - used by thousands of employees, replacing manual distribution list management.
- Mentored and set technical standards for a team of 3 front end engineers.
Years
2023 -Present
Ocado
2022 - 2023
Senior Software Engineer
- Led the platform-wide migration from Universal Analytics to GA4 on behalf of ~100 engineers, ensuring a consistent changeover and zero gaps in measurement ahead of UA deprecation.
- Delivered the Recipes feature end-to-end across Ocado Smart Platform - a greenfield project spanning 10+ international retailers serving millions of weekly customers. Led 2 junior engineers and coordinated closely with backend and mobile teams shipping the same feature.
Years
2022 -2023
Sky
2018 - 2022
Front End Developer → Senior Front End Developer
- Built large-scale data visualisation tools for monitoring viewership and streaming health - a React Native app for C-suite and a Next.js dashboard used company-wide. Critical during the launches of Peacock, SkyShowtime, and Showmax. Delivered end-to-end and still in daily use years later.
- Built the analytics dashboard for a mobile network launch that now has 3.7 million customers - a data-dense React app tracking metrics from acquisition to network performance, surfacing ML-driven anomaly detection.
- Built a React boilerplate adopted by dozens of teams and used as the foundation for graduate training across the organisation.
Years
2018 -2022
SPAR UK
2014 - 2018
Graduate Buyer → Trading Manager
Before working as a software engineer, I had a career in food retail buying.
- Commercial responsibility for ~£120m retail category - negotiated supplier terms, launched own-label products, managed a small team.
- Started building internal tools to improve buying workflows, which led to a career change into software engineering.
Years
2014 -2018
02 / Study
Education
Academic background.
University of the West of England, Bristol
BA Business Studies
2011 - 2014
Years
2011 -2014
03 / Toolkit
Skills
Core technologies and disciplines.
- JavaScript
- TypeScript
- HTML
- CSS
- React
- Next.js
- React Native
- Expo
- Tailwind
- Styled Components
- TanStack Query
- Redux
- Node
- Bun
- Express
- GraphQL
- tRPC
- PostgreSQL
- Prisma
- Drizzle ORM
- Vitest
- Testing Library
- Playwright
- Git
- Webpack
- Figma
- A11y
- WebSockets
- GenAI
04 / Personal Work
Projects
Selected work outside my day job.
mdplane
ActiveA markdown coordination layer for agent workflows with shared timelines for task claims, progress updates, and clean handoffs.
- Agentic AI,
- Workflow UI,
- Dev Tooling
PersonaGen
ActiveAn API that generates statistically grounded synthetic personas, built for developers testing LLM workflows.
- AI Workflows,
- Synthetic Data,
- API Design
Draftastic
ActiveA web app for fast, fair team drafting, designed to create balanced teams effortlessly.
- Real-time UI,
- Collaboration,
- Workflow Design