Hands-on, staff-level engineer and Head of Engineering at Sign In App, with more than 20 years’ experience and an unusually wide and deep skillset across frontend, backend, databases and infrastructure in TypeScript, Vue, Go, PHP, Laravel, Flutter and AWS. Owns architecture, performance, reliability and technical strategy, and takes systems from design through implementation, deployment and production support. Took the product from a single server to a highly available, multi-region AWS platform serving customers around the world, and introduced the testing that now exceeds 11,000 tests. Has made AI part of how the whole team codes, reviews pull requests and learns new technologies, without lowering review or testing standards.
James Dempster · Curriculum vitae
James Dempster
Staff Software Engineer · Head of Engineering
TypeScript / Vue Go PHP / Laravel AWS AI-assisted engineering
Northampton, UK (remote)Email via LinkedInLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/james-dempster-19533011GitHub: github.com/jdempsterProfile
Experience
Sign In App Northampton and remote8 yrs 3 mos
Visitor management SaaS used by organisations around the world.
Head of Engineering
Dec 2021 – present4 yrs 10 mos
Leads engineering across the Laravel API, the Vue and TypeScript web portals and the Flutter mobile and kiosk apps, supporting multiple engineering and design teams around the world across time zones. Responsible for architecture, infrastructure, cloud costs, security, engineering standards and hiring, and coaches engineers mainly through code review.
- Modularised the Laravel platform without a rewrite, moving to an event-driven architecture with architecture tests enforcing module boundaries.
- Rebuilt Docker so one image serves local development, CI and production, then migrated every production region to ECS Fargate in a phased blue/green rollout with no downtime. Every merge now deploys to production.
- Keeps the platform highly available while managing cloud spend through right-sizing and autoscaling.
- Supported SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certification from the engineering side.
- Built the SDLC and engineering standards, enforced through architecture tests, static analysis and OpenAPI contract tests.
- Trained every engineer in AI-assisted development across backend, frontend and Flutter through demos, pairing and review, with shared project context, custom skills and agents. AI pull-request review runs in CI, and human review stays the final gate.
- Took AI beyond code: tickets, bug triage and fixes, performance investigations, testing and design-system UI, connected through MCP.
- Led every PHP and Laravel upgrade since 2018, from PHP 7.2 / Laravel 5.7 to PHP 8.5 / Laravel 13, and the move to MySQL 8.
- Built AI product features on AWS Bedrock, with guardrails and LLM-judge evaluations.
- Localised the product into 22 languages with an AI translation workflow built on glotfile, an open-source tool written for the job.
Development Team Lead
Jul 2018 – Dec 20213 yrs 6 mos
- Introduced automated testing to codebases that had none, backend and frontend (PHPUnit, Pest, Vitest). The suite has since grown to more than 11,000 tests that run on every change.
- Reworked the application to scale horizontally and migrated it from a single server to AWS, with all infrastructure in Terraform from day one.
- Designed the multi-region architecture that lets customers keep their data in their own region.
- Led root-cause analysis of production performance using slow-query logs, execution plans and profiling, fixing causes with targeted indexes and removing N+1 patterns and expensive ORM loading.
Emailcenter Milton Keynes
High-volume email marketing platform for large consumer brands.
Lead / Senior Full-stack PHP Developer
Apr 2007 – Jul 201811 yrs 4 mos
Joined as Web Developer, promoted in 2008.
- Led a team of developers across office and remote working, mentored junior engineers, and set coding standards (PSR-12), pull-request review and automated testing with PHPUnit, Codeception, Jest and Puppeteer.
- Planned, architected and built the platform, including a Vue drag-and-drop workflow builder for complex campaigns, and microservices and integrations in strict-typed PHP 7.
- DBA for a replicated MySQL cluster and DevOps across datacentre and AWS servers, solving performance issues under large data volumes and traffic spikes.
- Moved the codebase from PHP 4 to object-oriented PHP 5 and added SOAP, REST and JSON APIs.
Earlier career
- Web Developer GG.COMJul 2005 – Apr 20071 yr 10 mos
- Web Developer Freetimers InternetJul 2004 – Jul 20051 yr 1 mo
- XP Deployment Manager BarclaycardOct 2003 – Dec 20041 yr 3 mos
Technical expertise
- Architecture
- Service-oriented and event-driven systems, distributed systems, multi-region and multi-tenant SaaS, API design with OpenAPI
- Languages
- TypeScript, JavaScript, Go, PHP 8, SQL
- AI engineering
- AI-assisted coding, AI pull-request review, training engineers in AI tools, Claude Code, MCP, custom agents and skills, AWS Bedrock, LLM evaluation
- Backend
- Laravel, Symfony components, REST APIs, queues and workers
- Frontend & mobile
- Vue, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Flutter
- Testing & quality
- PHPUnit, Pest, Vitest, PHPStan, architecture tests, OpenAPI contract tests
- Cloud & infrastructure
- AWS (ECS Fargate, Aurora, ElastiCache, SQS, SNS, CloudFront, Bedrock), Terraform, Docker, GitHub Actions
- Data & performance
- MySQL 8 and Aurora, Redis, DynamoDB, Athena; profiling, slow-query analysis, execution plans, indexing
- Leadership & delivery
- Technical strategy, hiring and mentoring, SDLC ownership, trunk-based continuous deployment, distributed teams
- Security & compliance
- SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, OIDC SSO, SCIM provisioning