Ross Mackay
About
I'm a full-stack developer based in London with a proven track record of breaking down problems, identifying efficient solutions, and delivering results. Over the past 10+ years, I've worked across industries - from early-stage startups to established agencies. My focus is on writing clean, functional code that solves real business needs.
My core tech is Node.js, React, Typescript and their respective ecosystems, but I'm comfortable working in, and contributing to services built in a range of programming languages. I'm particularly interested in opportunities involving functional languages like Elixir or Clojure.
email: hi@rossmackay.cogithub: mcky
Recent clients (contract)
Oak National Academy (2021-2024)
AI Labs: In 2023 I was approached by Oak to help them take their LLM experiments from prototype scripts to production services. We launched 2 new AI tools to assist teachers, utilizing a novel approach of streaming structured LLM responses to the browser to improve the UX of long-running prompts. Productionising these entailed instrumenting and adding authorization/access control, observability, reporting, custom back-office dashboards and service hardening. Ultimately the experiments proved successful and Oak are now integrating the AI features into their main apps.
Stack: Next.js, Typescript, Postgres (w/ Prisma), Clerk, Inngest, Langhchain, LLMOps, Retool, Redis, tRPC
Prior to AI Labs I worked with Oak on a number of different projects, spanning the entirety of their tech stack. One highlight was redeveloping and re-launching their asset downloads experience. By enabling bulk downloads of entire lessons or collections of lessons, and streamlining the (fully accessible) UI, we were able to save teachers a lot of time. On the back-end, the service was extended to zip bundles of assets together, intelligently caching them to reduce download times.
Stack: Next.js, Typescript, Serverless architecture (GCP, Cloudflare workers), Postgres (w/ Hasura), GraphQL, Sanity.io
Zero-1 / Lifted care (2019-2020)
Zero-1 are Corporate Venture Builder & Startup Studio, giving me the opportunity to work on both their established businesses (Lifted) and new startups.
Lifted care: Lifted care provide in-home care, facilitated by both client and carer-facing apps and complex backoffice software. I worked with Lifted to add and improve features in their react native apps, react based admin web-apps, carer payroll calculation and reporting workflows
Aside from Lifted I worked on Zero-1's other experiments, iterating quickly to try and validate product viability. Another large part of my responsibilities was supporting their junior developers through mentoring, pair programming and code review.
Stack: Typescript (+ tsoa, TypeORM, TypeGraphQL), Nest.js, Next.js, React Native, Postgres, AWS
Zappar (2022)
y’all (2021)
JAAM (2021)
Moving Brands (2019, 2020)
YunoJuno (HQ) (2019)
Wizarding World (via Huge) (2018)
Ekino (2017)
Beamly (2017)
StinkDigital (2016)
2PAx (2016)
Instinctif Partners (2016)
Unmade (2016)
The Rumpus Room (2015)
The Telegraph (2015)
WhatLeadsTo (2015)
Kota Creative (2014)
Comprehensive work experience & client history available online at
rossmackay.co
Education
BA Digital Media Design (2012 - 2015)
London College of Communication
A multi-disciplinary degree focusing on creative applications of technology, in my final year I focused on applications of wearable technology. For my thesis I developed a prototype 3D-printed wearable, using BLE to communicate with a companion iOS app (Obj-C) and the accompanying web services backing it.
Skills: Creative coding, hardware, motion graphics, 3D modelling, video production