John Whiles

I am a product-minded software engineer with 8 years of experience working at high-growth companies.

I'm currently particularly interested in:

New forms of software enabled by LLMs
Decentralized communication protocols like the AT Protocol, Microformats, and ActivityPub
What comes after React

Professional Experience

Staff Software Engineer

March 2024 - Present

I lead development on the Metamask developer dashboard.
I am working with newly acquired companies and other Consensys teams to combine our various developer offerings into one coherent platform.
I am leading hiring efforts to build out the Metamask developer team.

CTO

September 2023 - December 2023

As part of the founding team was accepted onto Techstar’s London 2023 cohort.
Was responsible for the initial technical direction of the company.
Built MVPs of potential Roost products including services to help house sharers live harmoniously, and tools for identifying property investment opportunities.
Worked closely with the CEO and COO to define the company’s strategy and direction.

Senior Software Engineer

March 2020 - September 2023

I Was a key member of Contentful’s App Framework team.
- I built a hosting solution for Contentful Apps, enabling users to easily run their own code inside the Contentful web app.
- Built a system that allowed users to share their Apps with other organisations. This was a key feature to support enterprise users and open source App developers.
- I worked directly with enterprise customers who used the App Framework, both offering support with technical issues and gathering feedback to understand what new features we should build.
Managed Contentful’s fleet of PostgreSQL databases which support 30% of Fortune 500 companies.
- Lead a project to perform major version upgrades across the entire fleet of hundreds of databases with zero downtime for customers.
- Maintained a custom Kubernetes operator, which ensured databases and supporting infrastructure were always in the correct state.
Rebuilt the front-end technical interview, reducing the amount of time engineers spent in each interview by 40%.
Helped junior engineers on-board successfully into the Company by providing mentorship and guidance.

Frontend Engineer

June 2019 - March 2020

Worked on Soundcloud’s music publishing product, allowing users to publish their music to other platforms.
Implemented a system that allowed users to tag each other in comments.
Improved page load times on an internal admin tool by multiple orders of magnitude, which made it possible for a moderation team to achieve their goals.

Senior Software Engineer

July 2018 - June 2019

Built a design system which ensured accessibility and consistency across the entire product.
Implemented the dynamic mortgage interview, which is the core of Habito’s user journey.
As part of a two-person team, restyled Habito’s entire website in one month.

Senior Software Engineer

January 2018 - July 2018

Moved one of The Trainline’s busiest services from C# to Node.js, improving performance and maintainability.
Improved The Trainline’s internal design system.

Senior Software Engineer

March 2017 - January 2018

Built a rich UI for a new financial reporting service.
Built a component library for the design system.
Led a TypeScript migration, ensuring that builds continued to work, and helping the engineering team learn TypeScript.

2016 - 2017

Student developer

2010 - 2013

BA Politics with Philosophy (2:1)