Ross Mackay

About

I'm a product-focused engineer based in London. Over the past 13 years I've worked across early-stage startups, agencies and public sector organisations, typically brought in to take prototypes and experiments to production. More recently that's meant building AI-powered products, but the core of what I do is turning ambiguous problems into clean, well-architected software.

My core stack is Node.js, React and Typescript, with experience across the full delivery chain: infrastructure, CI/CD, databases and third-party integrations. I'm particularly interested in opportunities involving functional languages like Elixir or Clojure.

phone: +447805284648

email: hi@rossmackay.co
github: mcky

Work experience (contract)

&Above (Apr 2025 - Present)

AI Avatar platform: Took an early prototype from a separate technology partner and re-architected it into a scalable, commercially deployable product - decoupling tightly bound frontend and backend systems, establishing clean API boundaries with the avatar tech provider, and building the platform to support multiple user types with distinct onboarding journeys, cross-tenant permissions and a unified subscription billing model across B2B and B2C contexts.

Stack: AdonisJS, Next.js, Typescript, Azure

AI Compliance engine: Led the engineering team building an AI-powered platform for Tesco's retail media ad creation and compliance workflow. Built the core compliance engine using multimodal LLMs to scan creatives against hundreds of Tesco-specific rules - dynamically composed at runtime based on ad channel, placement and regulated category. Also built an in-browser ad builder that generated compliant creatives from a single base asset across all required formats. Developed an evaluation suite and a database-driven prompt/model configuration layer for continuous optimisation of compliance accuracy. Reduced creative approval cycles from up to four weeks to days.

Stack: NestJS, Next.js, Typescript, GCP

Essensys (Feb - Apr 2025)

I was brought in to modernize and maintain a business-critical Next.js application powering their networking infrastructure migration. I converted the codebase to TypeScript, modernized state management and data fetching patterns, while adding new functionality. To ensure reliability during the migration, I established integration & e2e test coverage, enabling confident refactoring of legacy code.

Stack: Next.js, Typescript, MUI, Playwright

Oak National Academy (2021-2024)

Oak National Academy are a public body that provide teachers with free lesson planning and teaching resources. Between 2021 and 2024 I was hired by Oak to work on a number of different projects.

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 LLM responses as structured JSON to the client, improving 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 on many different projects at Oak, with responsibilities spanning the entirety of their tech stack, from feature work and performance tuning to video processing pipelines and large scale migrations. I also championed Typescript adoption at Oak, convincing key stakeholders on the engineering team, mentoring team members on advanced Typescript techniques, and leading later efforts on E2E/runtime type-safety

Stack: Next.js, Typescript, Serverless architecture (GCP, Cloudflare workers), Postgres (w/ Hasura), GraphQL, Sanity.io, Playwright

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), NestJS, Next.js, React Native, Postgres, AWS, Cypress

Zappar (2022)

Zappar worked with Britvic to create a gamified WebAR experience. While Zappar's internal developers handled the AR via Three.js, I was tasked with implementing the game progression logic and third-party backend integration, while maintaining state synchronization between React and ThreeJS contexts for a seamless experience.

Stack: React, Zustand, Three.js

y'all (2021)

Implemented a custom authentication/access control system across the serverless stack, CMS and Next.js app. Deep sanity integration for user group and permission management.

Stack: sanity.io, auth0, Next.js, AWS

JAAM (2021)

Created an interactive learning experience for medical professionals to learn about new immunotherapy treatments. Implemented in React as a game-like experience with branching learning paths, with each state and path declaratively represented in a dependency graph.

Stack: React, Typescript

Moving Brands (2019, 2020)

I've worked with Moving Brands on a number of projects, including:

Adding realtime session functionality to deliver virtual tours of a large manufacturer's facilities during COVID-19.
Building a marketing site for a california based electric vehicle company, including user generated content submissions.

Stack: Next.js, Hapi, sanity.io, Serverless framework (AWS), Typescript, Gatsby.js

YunoJuno (HQ) (2019)

Re-platformed YunoJuno's hard-coded gatsby marketing site to be CMS driven.

Stack: React, Gatsby.js, Contentful, GraphQL

Wizarding World (via Huge) (2018)

Led a team to build the first stages of a the Wizarding World web platform.

Stack: React (SSR), GraphQL, Node, Contentful, Jest, CSS Modules

Ekino (2017)

Built a financial dashboard powered by a modular CMS, integrating with both new and legacy APIs.

Stack: React, RxJS, D3.js

Beamly (2017)

Built the platform to power the next generation of marketing sites for a range of household beauty & fragrance companies.

Stack: Node, Express, Chai, Cucumber

StinkDigital (2016)

Created cutting-edge digital experiences including a digital treasure-trail housed in a web-based OS and a webGL + AI-powered fashion designer.

Stack: React, Redux, OS.js, Express

2PAx (2016)

Built both the prototype and v1 of a real-time restaurant management platform.

Stack: React, Redux (& Sagas), websockets, Stripe integration

Instinctif Partners (2016)

Redeveloped a legacy site whilst implementing a new design system to be used across microsites. Built a custom data visualization microsite.

Stack: React, Jekyll, Wordpress

Unmade (2016)

Refreshed marketing site to reflect new brand direction, extracted shared components from marketing & e-commerce projects into a component library.

Stack: ES6, CSS, Gulp

The Rumpus Room (2015)

Built large scale innovative campaigns for clients such as the UN, sporting celebrities and musicians. Rapid prototyping of campaigns in conjunction with creatives.

Stack: React, Redux, Django integration

The Telegraph (2015)

Developed a tool for journalists to enrich articles with contextual information, with similar tools now used by many big name digital news sites.

Stack: React, Bootstrap

Work experience (permanent / other)

WhatLeadsTo (2015)

Built the early stages of a platform to help charities and business better measure and report their social impact. Worked closely with designers and stakeholders to rapidly prototype and test features.

Stack: React (w/ Flux architecture), Node, Express, MongoDB

Kota Creative (2014)

Led development on a host of wordpress websites for clients in the hospitality sector.

Stack: JS, CSS, Wordpress

FuelStory / Converge Collective (2013)

Worked on the rebranding and strategy for a rapidly growing London coworking space and prototyped a number of small apps and wordpress websites, handling everything from design to competitor research and market analysis.

Stack: JS, CSS, Wordpress

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