Sam Pennington

Managed 11 engineers across Growth, Acquisition, and Activation teams, driving high-performance, quality delivery, and professional growth within a fast-paced SaaS environment.

• Scaled engineering team from 3 to 11 members across two teams, leading end-to-end hiring pipelines, behavioral interviews, and technical upskilling initiatives.
• Improved team performance by drastically reducing incident rates to a rarity within a quarter through quality workshops, technical roadmaps, and accountability frameworks.
• Developed and implemented a company-wide technical test scoring system, significantly reducing bias in engineering hiring processes.
• Delivered a complex product localization project across all engineering teams, directly contributing to a 15% increase in subscription conversion.
• Built robust processes and tooling for A/B experiments and feature flags, enhancing engineering team efficiency and product iteration across all teams.

Contributed as a Senior Front-End Engineer within a cross-functional product team, focused on delivering OVO's mission for zero-carbon energy solutions.

• Mentored junior engineers and year-in-industry students, accelerating their proficiency in React, Typescript, HTML/CSS, and general web development best practices.
• Conducted pair programming and system design interviews, actively contributing to the recruitment and selection of high-caliber engineering talent.
• Developed and deployed a comprehensive End-to-End (E2E) testing suite using Docker, Cypress, and AWS services (S3, Terraform, Lambda, ECS Fargate), ensuring constant visibility and improving system uptime.
• Contributed to the development and integration of the internal OVO Design System, ensuring consistent UI/UX and accelerating front-end development cycles.

Served as a Full Stack JavaScript Developer, building a new car buying platform for WhatCar? that connected potential buyers with dealerships.

• Engineered and launched a new car buying platform for WhatCar?, streamlining the process of connecting potential car buyers with dealerships.
• Developed robust front-end components using React, Redux, and Redux Saga, enhancing user experience and application responsiveness.
• Implemented scalable back-end solutions using Node.js, AWS Lambda, and MongoDB, supporting high-volume data transactions for the car buying platform.

Collaborated as a Junior Software Developer to build an automated call assistant application.

• Developed a new automated call assistant application alongside a senior engineer, enhancing operational efficiency.
• Contributed to front-end development using React and Styled Components, ensuring a responsive and intuitive user interface.
• Utilized Node.js and AWS Serverless with DynamoDB for scalable and efficient back-end functionality.

Responsible for HTML email creation, database querying, and website updates, gaining foundational IT infrastructure experience for a small company.

• Managed the creation and deployment of HTML emails, ensuring accurate content delivery for marketing and communication initiatives.
• Performed database queries and updates using MySQL, maintaining data integrity and supporting website functionality.
• Contributed to website updates using JavaScript, PHP, and CSS, enhancing user experience and content presentation.

Led the London Education program, overseeing a software development course to empower refugees with tech skills for employment.

• Managed a team of 15+ volunteers, coordinating efforts to successfully run a comprehensive coding bootcamp.
• Delivered engaging lessons in JavaScript, React, Node.js, HTML, and CSS, equipping students with in-demand programming skills.
• Facilitated career transitions for refugees by providing practical software development training and mentorship.

A custom React hook developed to track user scrolling down the page, fulfilling a specific requirement at OVO.

A React-native hook providing an abstraction over React Native's async storage with added functionality.