Ryan Harman, Software Engineer

When I was promoted to Staff Engineer I took on the whole frontend platform - the app, the frontend API and the infrastructure behind it - for our automation product, leading its direction as much as still writing code myself and shipping features.

These days it’s part steering the platform and part still contributing:

• Own the technical standards the frontend team works to, and steer our initiatives - from the product improvements we ship week to week through to the bigger technical bets.
• Run our frontend guild and learning sessions, and mentor the ten other engineers on the team, from the Seniors down - easily the most rewarding part of the job.
• Work hand in hand with product, design and our devops and architecture teams, helping shape where we take things next.
• Led us off Vercel onto self-managed AWS - CloudFront and S3 hosting with a Lambda API - and now own that frontend infrastructure as code in AWS CDK, from hosting constructs to multi-environment deploys and secret management.
• Built our frontend observability end to end: a telemetry pipeline feeding Sentry, PostHog and anything else we plug in, with error classification, distributed tracing and source map uploads, so we can find a root cause and ship a fix the same day.
• Replaced our legacy auth with a multi-tenant setup - a Cognito and Microsoft Entra (MSAL) flow that handles token refresh, cross-origin sessions and per-tenant isolation.
• Orchestrated a real-time sync engine on AWS AppSync Events and TanStack DB, so execution and mailbox updates land live over SigV4-authenticated subscriptions.
• Drove the modernisation of our stack - React 19, Vite 7, TanStack Router and Query, tRPC - making it better both for our users and for the engineers building on it.

I joined Saber as a Senior Frontend Engineer, spending most of my time shipping core product features whilst quietly laying down the foundations the frontend platform still runs on today.

Looking back, the work fell into a few buckets:

• Managed our initial contractors and the output they shipped.
• Onboarded and mentored the frontend engineers we hired through this period.
• Delivered the core features within the product - the workflow builder and canvas, document handling and the mailbox.
• Moved us onto a pnpm and Turborepo monorepo, pulling our shared @workspace packages (UI library, schemas, tRPC) into one place for proper end-to-end type safety.
• Set up our coding standards and testing documentation, and kept them current as we grew.
• Built the foundations of our integration testing with MSW, Vitest and a local mock database, replacing the brittle Vitest mocking setup we had before.
• Stood up the first versions of our auth and observability - Cognito-token authentication, and Sentry with structured logging in the BFF, which later grew into the wide-event logging we run through Sinks today.

Partnering with forward-thinking individuals, startups and enterprises to develop solutions that drive business success and meet ambitious deadlines. Specialising in React and Node.js development - leading technical implementations, establishing best practices, and consistently shipping high-quality products on schedule for various companies.

Built and maintained a cross platform social media application, architected solutions to bridge web and mobile experiences.

• App, a React Native project deployed via fastlane, styled with Tamagui. Due to adoption from an agency we immediately begun implementing TypeScript, improving the overall quality of the codebase, adding unit tests, storybook, documentation and CI/CD pipelines.
• Portal, a performance focussed Vite React app, ensuring WCAG compliance and cross-browser compatibility.
• SDK, a project allowing seamless website integrations through iframes, expanding product reach and enhancing customer engagement capabilities.
• Internal design system, a unified system using Tamagui, facilitating consistent UI/UX across mobile and web platforms.

Specialist React/Node developer working with AWS cloud. Worked with Solid.js, Svelte and Laravel across multiple smaller projects. Notable client work:

• ASARM, a React Native and Next.js application, that enables patients with fatigue related conditions to record their activity and generate prescriptions.
• Xploro, provided architectural support for large scale refactoring of the API to improve developer velocity. Led incremental TypeScript adoption, general codebase improvements, unit testing and TDD introduction, update of components to use Radix UI, Tailwind, and React Query across the portal.
• Creamfields web, implemented automatic image optimisation in CloudFront and auto scaling within AWS Fargate to facilitate cost saving and performance improvements.