Bradley Wright

Leading engineering for merchant growth in core markets and international expansion.

Overall Engineering Leader for the Shop Pay and Shop Identity. Growing Shopify's consumer wallet and marketplace.

Leading engineering for the buyer-facing surfaces on the Shop App. My portfolio includes the app itself, our AI products, infrastructure, and product search. I also kept Shop Minis.

Building out a mobile-first shopping ecosystem for Shopify Partners, focused on the Shop App.

Pollen was an invite-only marketplace with 34,000 of the most influential 16-28 year olds which brands can access to drive incremental revenue and tap into an audience notoriously difficult to reach. Our members bring their friends to the best experiences and share rewards such as free tickets, backstage passes, meet & greets and queue jumps. We partner with leading brands including Live Nation, C3 Presents, MGM Resorts, Universal Music Group and more. We also integrate with ticketing providers such as Ticketmaster, Eventbrite, Priceline, Stubhub, SeeTickets, Stubhub, Paylogic and Front Gate Tickets. Through Pollen White Label our clients license our technology and services to run their own white labelled ambassador campaigns and drive incremental revenue through word-of-mouth sales. Pollen went into administration in August 2022.

As Head of Web Engineering I was both the community lead for frontend developers, but also functioned as the primary technical leader for the main marksandspencer.com website, working across in-house product teams, enterprise IT/Operations, business stakeholders throughout the business, and M&S’s enormous systems integrator contractor team (more than 100 on and off-shore developers). I help with maintaining a customer focus in all areas, technical design, coaching, escalation, unblocking product teams, and engagement with other parts of the business. Technologies involved are the IBM e-commerce suite (eg WebSphere) and Angular with ES6 frontends, however my primary focus was the culture and people within engineering, ensuring that they are well represented within senior leadership and have vital input into the digital strategy of M&S.

The Digital Group brings together GOV.UK, GOV.UK Verify and several of the new Government as a Platform teams (e.g. Payments In and Digital Communications platforms). I serve as Head of Technology for this group, ensuring that technical strategy and culture of each functional product within the group are aligned with both our needs and the needs of our users. The group has about 80 technical staff spread across 6 digital services. I sat on the main leadership team, representing agile and technical views across the entire group, and providing coaching and direction for other senior technical staff within the individual products/programmes while keeping technical staff focused on both their users and business needs.

As Technical Architect for GOV.UK, I was directly responsible for the technical platform strategy, system design/architecture, security, technical operations/disaster recovery, and engineering culture of the GOV.UK platform and organisation. The GOV.UK team is about 100 people, with 35 technical staff. Primary day to day work consists of: large team leadership (public speaking, documentation, communications, 1:1s with team leads), stakeholder management (internal and external), line management/mentoring, and technical strategy/system design for the platform. As part of my strategic work I helped product owners focus their teams on user needs and pragmatic solutions that integrate well with other parts of the service. Towards the end of my tenure on this programme (whilst also acting as Head of Technology) I was the technical product manager and primary senior stakeholder for an extensive re-architecture project designed to bring together the publishing systems in use with a focus on loose coupling and development team velocity.

As Technical Lead for the Inside Government programme, I was responsible for technical team direction and delivery as GOV.UK deployed publishing and website migration services for the 24 Ministerial Departments. I also contributed directly to the Beta and Live launch of GOV.UK. Primary day to day work consists of: small team leadership (pairing, coaching), agile team working, cross-team collaboration, multi-disciplinary collaboration, programming, and application design and architecture. I also was among the first tranche of engineering-facing managers at GDS, defining and leading on management culture and career definition for other technical staff.

As the first employee at Smarkets I got to help grow the company from its first user to over £1b traded on the platform. I wrote most of the frontend code and initial backend code, ran the scrum and prioritisation process, set the company ethos for customer service standards, and was directly responsible for early hiring and interviewing. This role touched on a wide variety of technologies, roles, and functions: from infrastructure to product management to agile coaching to customer support.

Website development, web standards, agile practices, scrum, coding standards, accessibility consultation, and Django development for large scale radio websites and content management systems.

Team lead on Yahoo! Answers. Agile practices, coding standards, test-driven development, front-end web development, accessibility, PHP development, and internationalisation.

Front-end web development, accessibility, website construction, PHP development, and internationalisation.

Front-end web development, client liaison, PHP development, and copy-writing.