{ "$schema": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jsonresume/resume-schema/v1.0.0/schema.json", "basics": { "name": "Craig Thompson", "label": "Head of Engineering ยท Hands-on, AI-first", "email": "craig@craigthompson.dev", "url": "https://craigthompson.dev", "summary": "Head of Engineering and full-stack software engineer with 20+ years building for the web. Led Hive HR's engineering through to its acquisition by WorkBuzz, and drove the shift to AI-first delivery: most code is now AI-generated and AI-reviewed against in-repo standards. Still close to the code, from the 100+ package TypeScript monorepo and CI/CD to AWS architecture, auth and security. Looking for a hands-on technical leadership role. Remote first, flexible hybrid considered in the North East; 3-month notice.", "location": { "city": "Newcastle upon Tyne", "countryCode": "GB", "region": "Tyne and Wear" }, "profiles": [ { "network": "GitHub", "username": "Craga89", "url": "https://github.com/Craga89" }, { "network": "LinkedIn", "username": "craigmichaelthompson", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigmichaelthompson/" } ] }, "work": [ { "name": "Hive HR", "position": "Head of Engineering", "location": "Newcastle upon Tyne, UK", "startDate": "2018-12", "summary": "Led engineering for a multi-tenant B2B SaaS employee engagement platform running 24/7 for enterprise, mid-market and SME customers, with a cross-functional team of up to 12 engineers, through to the company's acquisition by WorkBuzz.", "highlights": [ "Led the department's shift to AI-first engineering over the past year: most code is now AI-generated and reviewed by AI alongside human reviewers, against in-repo style and coding guidelines.", "Helped start an AI agent service built with Mastra on Amazon Bedrock with evals in CI.", "Led the consolidation of ~18 repositories into one TypeScript monorepo (100+ packages) with history intact.", "Led the replacement of a legacy sign-in system with a new auth framework: SAML SSO, enforceable 2FA, per-identity rate limiting, key rotation.", "Led repo-wide toolchain migrations by codemod, including oxlint + oxfmt (4,366 files), native TypeScript (3,502 files) and TypeScript 7.", "Led the redesign of a core MongoDB reporting data model: 10x higher complexity ceiling.", "Built and evolved CI/CD on self-hosted Buildkite (Terraform) with an in-house TypeScript build engine; continuous deployment with daily automatic releases.", "Led AWS modernisation to Fargate and ECS Service Connect, with CloudFront and WAF as the only public entry.", "Led the inception of the first Cypress automation suite and evolved it in CI with the Test Automation Engineers; led the switch to Playwright for huge gains in CI performance and stability.", "Evidence-led AWS cost reduction: about $1.3k a month documented from three changes.", "Saw the company through from startup to its acquisition by WorkBuzz, providing technical leadership throughout and representing engineering right through due diligence.", "Hired 10+ engineers, full-time and outsourced; designed the interview process with the CTO and Deputy Head; evolved onboarding to largely self-driven, AI-assisted documentation.", "Reported to the CEO and CTO, preparing board material; partnered with Product on the roadmap; contributed to build-versus-buy and packaging decisions.", "Ran 1:1s and objectives feeding KPIs into board updates; promoted engineers to Senior and one to Deputy Head of Engineering; introduced and hired an AI Engineer role; managed redundancy and performance management.", "Technical expert on sales, customer and due-diligence calls; built a standard security Q&A set; handled SSO/SAML onboarding and data residency; primary escalation point for major customer issues.", "Set up the on-call rota (Jira Service Desk, Google Calendar) and status page; led on incidents from single-client issues to full outages; helped produce outage write-ups, runbooks and improvements; involved in the disaster recovery process.", "Owned the substantial monthly AWS budget, with cost anomaly detection; managed technical and IT suppliers and negotiated renewals; consolidated software tools and licences.", "Introduced and iterated on ways of working (Scrum, Kanban, project-based, AI-driven); documented the Secure Development Policy and coding guidelines in an AI-powered docs site; introduced cycle time and delivery time KPIs; worked through the move to mostly remote working.", "Worked directly with an outsourcing firm in India, onboarding 5+ Software Engineers and Automation Test Engineers to bolster the in-house team; many stayed for 2+ years.", "Was the technical point of contact for GDPR and ISO 27001 accreditation and annual audits; arranged yearly penetration tests with external vendors.", "Was the point person for internal IT: oversaw the hardware and IT estate and the Google Workspace directory, ran the MDM that provisions the Mac estate and enforces InfoSec and compliance policies, and set up and maintained the IT service desk." ] }, { "name": "Communicator", "position": "Technical Lead", "location": "Newcastle upon Tyne, UK", "startDate": "2013-12", "endDate": "2018-12", "summary": "Led a Scrum team of junior-to-mid engineers building the next generation of an email marketing SaaS platform sending billions of emails.", "highlights": [ "Led front-end development and mentored two software engineers.", "Architected a React drag-and-drop WYSIWYG Email Designer.", "Built a Node.js/Cheerio CSS-inlining microservice and Node.js functionality for new products.", "Led the migration from TFS to Git and TeamCity, then introduced GitLab with self-hosted runners for faster CI/CD." ] }, { "name": "Eutechnyx", "position": "Front-end Web Developer", "location": "Gateshead, UK", "startDate": "2011-01", "endDate": "2012-09", "summary": "Built interfaces and CMS pages for the Auto Club Revolution project with JavaScript and Backbone.js." }, { "name": "craigsworks", "position": "Consultant & Open-source Maintainer", "location": "Newcastle upon Tyne, UK", "startDate": "2008-04", "summary": "One-off projects for smaller and larger clients, from single websites to larger builds such as a crop management application; accessible UI libraries; author of qTip2 (~2k GitHub stars, 1,384 commits), working extensively with community contributors; 59 pull requests merged across 35 other open-source projects." } ], "education": [ { "institution": "Newcastle University", "url": "https://www.ncl.ac.uk/", "area": "Electronic & Computer Engineering", "studyType": "MEng", "startDate": "2008", "endDate": "2013" } ], "awards": [ { "title": "qTip featured in Smashing jQuery", "url": "https://www.wiley.com/en-ae/shop/general-end-user-computing/smashing-jquery-p-9780470977231", "date": "2011" }, { "title": "Famous Software Award (qTip2)" } ], "skills": [ { "name": "Leadership", "keywords": [ "Engineering leadership", "Engineering strategy", "Technical roadmap", "Team of up to 12 engineers", "Stakeholder communication", "Outsourcing", "Distributed teams", "Vendor management", "Hiring", "Interviewing", "People management", "Performance management", "Board reporting", "Stakeholder management", "Customer escalations", "Security questionnaires", "Incident management", "On-call", "Disaster recovery", "Budget ownership", "Supplier management", "Contract negotiation", "Scrum", "Kanban", "Remote teams" ] }, { "name": "Languages", "keywords": [ "TypeScript", "JavaScript", "HTML", "CSS", "Node.js", "Bash", "HCL" ] }, { "name": "Back end", "keywords": [ "Express", "GraphQL", "Apollo", "Koa", "REST", "OpenAPI", "Zod", "RxJS", "Microservices" ] }, { "name": "Front end", "keywords": [ "React", "Apollo Client", "Emotion", "Vite", "Storybook", "Playwright", "WCAG", "Cypress", "Test automation" ] }, { "name": "Data", "keywords": [ "MongoDB Atlas", "Atlas Search", "Elasticsearch", "Redis", "DynamoDB" ] }, { "name": "Cloud", "keywords": [ "AWS", "ECS", "Fargate", "Lambda", "CloudFront", "WAF", "VPC", "IAM", "Control Tower", "GCP", "Azure (limited)" ] }, { "name": "Delivery", "keywords": [ "CI/CD", "Git", "Terraform", "CloudFormation", "Docker", "Buildkite", "GitHub Actions", "pnpm", "Monorepos" ] }, { "name": "Security & compliance", "keywords": [ "GDPR", "ISO 27001", "Penetration testing", "SAML SSO", "2FA" ] }, { "name": "IT", "keywords": [ "Google Workspace", "MDM", "Mosyle", "Jamf", "macOS", "IT service desk", "Endpoint management", "Apple Business Manager", "ThreatDown" ] }, { "name": "Observability", "keywords": [ "Sentry", "OpenTelemetry", "Grafana", "CloudWatch", "AWS X-Ray" ] }, { "name": "AI", "keywords": [ "Claude Code", "Anthropic API", "Amazon Bedrock", "Amazon Q", "Mastra", "promptfoo", "GitHub Copilot", "AI-assisted development", "AI code review", "AI-first engineering" ] } ], "languages": [ { "language": "English", "fluency": "Native speaker" } ], "meta": { "canonical": "https://craigthompson.dev/cv.json", "version": "v1.0.0", "lastModified": "2026-10-16" }, "references": [ { "name": "Joe Forster, Senior AI Programmer at Ubisoft Reflections", "reference": "Craig is a very able developer, who is capable of putting together high-quality front-end solutions at lightning speed. Always friendly and willing to lend his expertise JavaScript, jQuery, CSS and related web technologies, he is indispensable part of the Auto Club Revolution web team." }, { "name": "Peter Davies, Software Engineering Leader | Product Business | Technology", "reference": "At the time of writing I am working with Craig on an ongoing very large and complex web-development project. Craig is the go-to person for all of the frontend jQuery and CSS related issues. He is also increasingly getting involved with the backend-development. An all-round excellent web-developer." } ] }