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

Junction

Product Engineer

Mar 2026-Present

I work hand-in-hand with product to define and build API-first solutions to improve Junction's customer experience.

Python,
TypeScript,
Postgres,
Redis,
React

Lawhive

Senior Engineering Manager

Oct 2025-Mar 2026

I was responsible for the product and platform engineers and primarily focused on three areas:

Increasing morale, reducing turnover, and creating a engineer-owned engineering culture
Working closely with talent to create a strong in-house talent pipeline from scratch
Working with the CTO to define our approach to AI enabled engineering

During my tenure:

Engineer retention increased from a low of ~55% to ~92%
I scaled the my teams by 100%
I supported the rollout out of AI tools across engineering

Farewill

Engineering Lead

Jan 2024-Oct 2025

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

My core responsibilities incldued: 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 unblocking engineers.

I 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 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 worked 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

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

Tractable

Developer

September 2020-June 2021

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

Limejump

Developer

February 2019-September 2020

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

Bricks and Mortar Studio

Owner/Director

2016-2020

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

Ask Me About

Nothing here is vibe-coded, I'm happy to talk in depth about these!

My multiplayer auto-battler game (plus the DSL I built!)
Creating a community around a trading-card game app
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
Building eink Displays
Tooling for art direction and responsive images of web images

Education

First Class Software Engineering BSc

Royal Holloway, University of London

2015-2018