James Winfield.

Hello, I’m James Winfield, and I’m a front-end software engineer.

I’ve been a software engineer since late 2016, though have really flourished at M&S, where I’ve progressed to senior engineer, alongside being tech lead – initially working on projects that were based around vanilla JavaScript, and over the last few years, NextJS, TypeScript, React and GraphQL.

This portfolio, and my encompassing WordPress blog is built on NextJS, TypeScript, React and GraphQL – as those are the technologies that I’m most excited about right now. Though I’ve been using Astro on my personal projects, which I’ve become rather a fan of, plus tried out Svelte.

JavaScript (ESNext), TypeScript
React, Next.js, Astro, Svelte

CSS, SCSS, Tailwind, CSS-in-JS (Emotion / styled-components)

Node.js (Express), PostgreSQL, GraphQL
Headless WordPress, PHP (working proficiency)

Vite, Webpack, GitHub Actions, AI-assisted development and workflows

Currently building a custom API using Express and TypeScript.

Previously worked with AngularJS and jQuery in legacy codebases.

I’m currently happy at M&S, working on large-scale transformation. I’d only consider a move for a truly interesting, remote-first role built with React and TypeScript.

I care about impact: solving problems, improving performance, and helping teams build products that drive revenue. I enjoy mentoring junior engineers and care deeply about accessibility, developer experience, and real-world behaviour over theoretical perfection.

Remote work and flexibility — including occasional working from abroad — are important to me.

Engineering

2024 – 2026: Led and owned a greenfield internal merchandising platform used by merchandisers to optimise on-site search (Elastic).
Built with React, TypeScript, Next.js, and CSS Modules. I owned the infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, testing strategy (unit, integration, Playwright E2E), observability, and alerting, taking the platform from zero to production adoption.

2023 – 2024: Senior engineer driving experimentation and personalisation, working closely with product and analytics to take experiments from ideation through to analysis. Built experimental components using React hooks and Optimizely, influencing how experimentation was run across the area.

2022 – 2023: Tech Lead for the Choose & Buy team, a self-driving, incremental revenue–generating team within Growth & Personalisation.
Led five engineers, delivering and testing ideas across both a legacy vanilla JavaScript stack and a modern React stack during an active migration.

2020 – 2022: Frontend Tech Lead within the Recommendations team, a highly successful A/B testing team generating significant proven incremental revenue.
Built and maintained experimentation features using vanilla JavaScript, SCSS, Handlebars, and Adobe Experience, while shaping frontend standards and delivery.

2019 – 2020: Rebuilt the Product Details Page, one of the most critical pages on the site, using ES6, IncrementalDOM, SCSS, Node, Express, and Handlebars, achieving 100% unit test coverage and improving maintainability of a core user journey.

Leadership & culture

Mentored a graduate engineer

Tech lead for new tech-stack adoption within Growth & Personalisation

Founding member of the Tech_Den community, bringing engineers together through talks, socials, and knowledge sharing

Member of the engineering recruitment team

Part of 24/7 on-call rota

Initiated the engineering social committee

Achievements – Lovespace:

2016 – 2019: Managed the front-end development of the Lovespace website, via WordPress, AngularJS and jQuery.

2018 – 2019: Converted the order flow from jQuery to AngularJS.

2017 – 2018: Led front-end aspect of internationalisation project, using WordPress Multisite, encoding to allow for translation and making necessary adjustments for new international markets.

2016: Expanded WordPress functionality to give more control to the marketing team over the website, via the WP-admin panel.

So a bit about my human side. I am logical and kind of creative – integrity, loyalty and honesty are absolutely key to my soul.

You’ll always be able to have a conversation with me on politics, economics or the stock market – but also football, travel, maybe cricket if I’ve been engaged recently. Oh and definitely on food.

You might find me at a pub on Sunday having a roast dinner, perhaps at a modern art exhibition or theatre, or a really good restaurant – I’m quite knowledgeable on London’s food scene but never eat out enough. Then again, I’m good at cooking and always try to cook 2-3 new recipes a week.

I’m very much about trying new things. New pubs, new restaurants, new holiday destinations – have flights to Japan book in 2026 and I cannot wait for that.