James Hattersley-Dykes

Saughall, Cheshire (open to hybrid/remote)jameshd@devdone.co.uklinkedin.com/in/jameshd/

Profile

Engineering leader with 10+ years in leadership roles managing managers and engineers, currently leading a 170+ engineering organisation divided across 22 teams with 6 Engineering Managers at Evri. Specialist in Developer Experience, Platform Engineering and Continuous Delivery: reduced manual change effort by ~3,000 days, built a dedicated DevEx function, and hired 20+ engineers through a structured interview process. With a track record of building high-performing engineering cultures, removing organisational friction, and translating engineering investment into terms that resonate with senior stakeholders. Looking to bring this blend of people leadership and technical depth to a mission-led, product-focused engineering team.

Key Skills

Leadership
Managing Managers and Engineers, Coaching & Mentoring, Goal Setting, Hiring & Team Scaling, Stakeholder Management, Presenting & Public Speaking, Flow, DORA Metrics, OKRs, Org Design, Engineering strategy
Technical
TypeScript, JavaScript, PHP, Java, APIs, REST, GraphQL, Serverless, Docker, Git
Delivery & Practice
Continuous Delivery & DevOps, AWS, TDD & BDD, Kanban, SCRUM
Quality
Playwright, WebDriver, Cypress, Web Performance

Experience

Senior Software Engineering ManagerEvri

– Present

  • Transitioned from Principal Engineer to Senior SEM, helped restructure the organisation for more balanced, direct team leadership across 6 Engineering Managers.
  • Duties included performance management of engineers, succession and headcount planning, budget/cost management, retention and staff engagement exercises.
  • Influenced the Senior Leadership Team illustrating process bottlenecks, securing buy-in to create a dedicated 5 person strong DevEx team and setting its roadmap which included standardised pipelines and an internal Backstage developer portal.
  • Removed approximately 3,000 days of manual effort by designing and rolling out automated change approval ('Flying Car Releases') process with DevEx. Measured with DORA moving Deployment Frequency from monthly to hourly cadence in some teams with a Change Fail Rate of sub 2%.
  • Ran 2x hands-on TDD workshops for 20+ engineers in partnership with the Test Practice Lead to embed a collaborative testing and development culture.
  • Hired 20+ engineers over 2 years using a scalable, scripted interview scoring process.
  • Coached a team to practice dark launching for the successful release of bulk shipping-label uploading functionality, testing in production as they worked.
  • Prioritised legacy application removal to reduce team cognitive load, building detection and removal tooling with AI-assisted development - Amazon Kiro.
  • Created a 2 person Front End Core squad to drive accessibility improvements plus carry out core web and design system upgrade work; hands-on in upgrading evri.com to Nuxt 3.
  • Introduced protected L&D time for all engineers and presented regularly at company Townhalls.
  • Created Engineering Principles and strategy aimed at improving delivery efficiency and stability, covered topics such as Trunk-based development, Test Automation, Monitoring and Security best practices.
  • Attained Applying Professional Kanban Certification from prokanban.org and mentor in Flow

Tech PrincipalAND Digital

–

  • Led a team building a prototype e-commerce site (NextJS, GraphQL, TypeScript, deployed to Vercel) for a prospective client, alongside a complementary React Native app — instrumental in securing a significant new client for AND.
  • Attained Contentful Professional certification; built content models for two complex client sites.
  • Planned, organised and won the company's first hackathon (social-good theme), proposing a ChatGPT-powered tool to help job-seekers without IT skills write cover letters.

Developer Experience Technical LeadBBC

–

  • Owned the strategy for improving the WebCore Platform's CI/CD developer experience.
  • Led the team in adopting IaC with AWS CDK (TypeScript) for CodeBuild workloads, cutting manual maintenance.
  • Reduced deployment times from 14 minutes to 3, driven by internal customer feedback and build-time metrics.
  • Led initiatives in dependency caching via AWS EFS/VPC networking and parallelised build workloads.
  • Owned team roadmap and workload distribution; wrote PR/FAQs and narratives to shape new initiatives; hired for the team and interviewed for other teams.

Contract RolesDev Done Ltd

–

  • 2018 - 2020 - The Very Group: Performance and API test automation and TDD coaching across a microservice architecture on AWS; led adoption of Contract Testing and Cross-Browser testing across multiple squads.
  • 2017 - 2018 - Cheshire Data Systems (CDL): Led development of a Symfony-based Asset Management application; built Gauge and WebDriver (Node.js) test suites; implemented feature toggles, mainline development and build pipelines for MyCarCheck.com; mentored a junior developer and several testers.
  • 2017 - Mann Island Finance: Built new functionality for a microservice-based loan processing platform; built a continuous end-to-end testing suite using Postman.

Head of TechnologySykes Cottages

–

  • Introduced Continuous Delivery, cycle time metrics, story splitting, Kanban and fast-feedback techniques to a team of 40+ technologists.
  • Embedded TDD, code craftsmanship and Lean-Agile principles; received recognition for shifting team mindset and culture.

Technical LeadBBC Live

–

  • Transformed the team to feature streams with weekly OKRs, tracked via Kanban; reduced manual test effort through automated regression testing.
  • Led mobbing sessions to familiarise developers with the whole codebase; partnered with Product and Project Managers on delivery planning.

Senior Web DeveloperBBC Sport & Live

–

  • Architected and led development of a new REST API powering all BBC Sport fixtures and results pages; promoted to Senior after just over a year.
  • Championed Continuous Delivery, moving developer culture from large feature branches to small, frequent, mainline commits; built a test automation framework running 500+ tests per build.
  • Rebuilt the Cricket Scorecard for the 2013 Ashes series, which received over 265,000 unique visits a day.

Education

  • MSc Information Systems — University of Chester
  • GNVQ Advanced IT — South Hunsley Sixth Form
  • GCSEs, Grades A–C — South Hunsley School

Projects, Presentations & Publications

  • Why your next site should be static! — talk on Static Site Generators and the JAMstack, with a demo.
  • Contract Testing with Pact — internal presentation at Very, repeated at Chester Devs Meetup.
  • Dev Done Website — static JAMstack site (NextJS), hosted on Netlify and AWS: devdone.co.uk
  • Dev Done Blog — occasional essays on Medium: @devdoneuk

References

Available on request.