Arran France

Software Engineering Manager

London, United Kingdom

arran@arranfrance.com

Profile

A hands-on software engineering manager who thrives wearing multiple hats and has a keen product focus.

Experience

Farewill

Engineering Lead

Jan 2024-Present

I currently lead Farewill's two engineering teams, six engineers in total, in a hybrid IC/manager role.

Core responsibilities include: supporting engineers with their growth and wellbeing, working with PMs to define the teams roadmaps, identifying, architecting, and prioritising core platform capabilities, and being a point of escalation for technical issues for engineers.

I've supported shipping improvements to the core Wills product offering to achieve:

A 75% increase of gifts lefts in wills (core product metric)
A 15% increase in recurring subscription revenue

I've also shipped core foundational improvements including:

Migrating the core API from JavaScript to TypeScript
Reducing the number of vulnerable dependencies from 56 to 6 and implementing processes to prevent regression
Consolidating to a single observable jobs framework
Foundational platform changes to support selling under multiple brands
Improving the observability of our platform with OpenTelemetry to identify bugs proactively reducing the MTTR and customer impact
R&D efforts to create AI tooling to aid will checkers

TypeScript,
Postgres,
Redis,
Node.js,
React,
Next.js,
Cloudflare

Tractable

Engineering Manager

May 2022-Jan 2024

I led the Estimating product responsible for the day-to-day operations of a team of eleven and the delivery of three product lines across three separate regions including Tractable's fastest growing product. I worked closely with my counterparts in product management (Director of Product) and research & AI development to define the team's strategy and with stakeholders in go to market to align on the product roadmap.

During my tenure I had 20 direct reports, from junior to staff level. I worked with my reports to define their personal objectives, create opportunities for them to thrive, and give them regular feedback to support their growth. Day to day I also provide context from across the business, focus them towards our OKRs, support team ceremonies where necessary, and sponsor cross-team engagements.

Within engineering, I work with senior management to define staffing needs, provide capacity planning, and to support our hiring efforts. Outside of engineering, I ran the company-wide employee led ESAT initiative to improve the workplace and worked with the people team as part of a small team redefining Tractable's company values.

I previously lead two platform oriented teams (8 engineers at senior plus) with the mandate to improve developer experience and deliver core services and capabilities for all product lines. In that role, I reduced unnecessary spend by £500k/pa and successfully defined and lead an initiative to introduce a cross product auth platform.

Tendable

Tech Lead

June 2021-April 2022

I was responsible for re-architecture of the platform's backend infrastructure from a monolith Ruby on Rails application to a scalable a microservice based architecture. Supporting that work I built an ETL framework to support analytics on large volumes of data, championed a move to a strongly typed RPC framework to support collaboration between back and mobile teams, and defined several reusable service templates and libraries.

In addition to my individual contributions, I took a lead on improving the way our team worked. I developed and introduced a completely new hiring pipeline for backend, full stack, and frontend developers with bias controls; lead a migration from Bitbucket to GitHub; and migrated our CI from a devops lead platform to developer owned GitHub Actions.

Ruby,
Rails,
Resque,
TypeScript,
Postgres,
Node.js,
Redis,
ETL,
Protobuf

Tractable

Developer

September 2020-June 2021

I was responsible for building a growing feature set and scaling our architecture to meet a rapidly growing number of clients across multiple geographies.

During my time I took on independent initiatives including: adjusting our pipeline to support flows using both fully AI driven decisions and human in the loop decisions; rebuilding applications to migrate the team's services to Kubernetes from DC/OS; creating a framework for automated end-to-end testing of our pipeline in production; and making the product reproducible across environments.

TypeScript,
GraphQL,
Kafka,
Node.js,
React,
Kubernetes,
Postgres,
Redis,
Docker,
AWS,
Gauge,
Jenkins,
Datadog,
ArgoCD,
Monorepo

Limejump

Developer

February 2019-September 2020

I was responsible for the ongoing re-architecture and redesign of a critical customer facing application as part of a cross disciplinary UX focused team.

During my time at Limejump I designed and implemented a solution that allows us to combine the existing legacy application with a new React implementation to allow us to incrementally deliver improvements to the user. I also architected and implemented a microservice approach to the backend to accommodate scale and cleanly divide responsibilities in a growing team.

Whilst at Limejump I drove change to several processes. I made significant contributions to our hiring and interview process, taking ownership of the technical screening phase of our process for full-stack and QA engineers. I also introduced guidance and led training around code reviews, led training on Kubernetes, and created and led an on-call system for our team. I took a role in mentoring developers and introduced an engineering wide 'Friday Developer Talk' slot.

Node.js,
React,
Redux,
Kubernetes,
Docker,
AWS,
Prometheus,
CircleCI,
Git,
Google Cloud

Bricks and Mortar Studio

Owner/Director

2016-2020

I ran my own consulting company working with non-profits to customise their processes and extend their software to support their needs. Examples include designing the API for a leading giving provider with $1m+ weekly revenue and producing a fit validating prototype for a pre-seed startup.

C#,
ASP.NET,
SQL,
Python3,
Pandas

Spark Development Network

Developer, Remote

June 2018-February 2019

Royal Holloway, University of London

Undergraduate Researcher

Summer 2016 / Summer 2017

Spark Development Network

Internship

Summer 2016

Hope Church

Communications Director

2013-2015

Ask Me About

My real-time mobile first application to make hosting movie nights easier (recommends films using ML!).
Writing software for running tabletop role-playing games
Developing mobile applications for Android and iOS in Flutter
Running a Kubernetes cluster
Solving problems in Rust
eink Displays
Tooling for art direction and responsive images for the web

Education

First Class Software Engineering BSc

Royal Holloway, University of London

2015-2018