Jake Shaw

Software engineer & interface craftsman.

Frontend engineer with a background in test, building accessible interfaces and AI-enhanced products. React, Next.js and Node: going deeper, not wider.

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Jake Shaw
01

Selected Work

2026 · Front-end Developer

Ask Andi

Built an AI-powered chatbot widget for AND Digital's website that discusses the consultancy's capabilities with prospective clients and routes them to the right expert.

  • GCP
  • Vertex AI
  • React
  • Next.js
  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
View case study
AND Digital logo
2026 · Front-end Developer

Asset Licensing Platform

Built the front-end upload flow for a platform that lets team managers distribute licensed media assets to customers.

  • AWS S3
  • Next.js
  • JavaScript
  • TypeScript
  • React
View case study
AND Digital logo
2025 · Software Engineer in Test (SEIT)

JLR - OneApp & Home Charging Units

Tested the API services behind JLR's OneApp and Home Charging Units products, covering happy and unhappy paths ahead of production releases.

  • Gherkin
  • Robot Framework
  • JavaScript
  • TypeScript
  • Python
View case study
JLR logo
2024-2025 · Software Engineer in Test (SEIT)

Travelchapter

Built and maintained a Cypress test suite spanning two newly merged flagship sites, plus a recurring data-integrity script that caught listings missing required property attributes before they reached customers.

  • Cypress
  • Gherkin
  • JavaScript
  • TypeScript
View case study
Travelchapter logo
02

About

I build interfaces that are simple to use, and simple to test.

I started on an internship at CloudM, adding an accordion menu to a knowledge base. Small feature, but I got completely absorbed in how the logic fitted together and how it ought to behave, and that settled it. I’ve always liked problems and puzzles, and this is just the version I never got tired of.

The longer version

A good stretch of my career since has been as a Software Engineer in Test (front-end at Travelchapter, back-end at JLR), and it left me with a conviction I haven’t shaken: the best user journey is usually the simplest one. Nobody wants to click through five things to get somewhere. It turns out the qualities that make a journey pleasant to use are the same ones that make it possible to test: honest semantic elements, predictable states, hooks where you need them. Building for testability and building for people pull in the same direction far more often than people assume.

So I care a great deal about accessibility, and about genuinely meeting the W3C and a11y standards rather than gesturing at them. Get that right while still building something that grips people, and you’ll have very happy users.

I’m not trying to be a jack of all trades. I’d rather master a core stack (React, Next.js, Node and Express) and extend outwards deliberately. Back-end was the part that frustrated me most, so I went at it directly; being able to contribute across a product instead of one layer of it changes the kind of work you can take on. Cloud, with AWS and GCP, is where that’s heading next. A lot of that deliberateness comes from reading. The Pragmatic Programmer has probably shaped how I think about building software more than any single project has.

Most recently that’s meant AI. I was part of a team that built Ask Andi, a chatbot live on AND Digital’s site that matches prospective clients to the right expert, which meant prompt hardening, abuse guardrails, and a great deal of work coaxing an LLM into responses that reliably conform to a JSON schema. That last part was harder than I expected and improved the product enormously. I’ve been reading around it since: Architecting Agentic Solutions with Claude most recently, which fed into sitting and passing Anthropic’s Claude Architect Foundations exam. AI-enhanced products are where a lot of the genuinely interesting work sits right now, and it’s the work I want more of.

Based
Manchester, UK
Status
Employed
Focus
Frontend · AI products · Accessibility · Full-stack JavaScript
03

Experience

  1. Since June 2022

    Product Developer

    AND Digital

    Consultant software engineer at AND Digital, delivering full-stack development and testing work across a range of client engagements.

    View role
  2. 4 Months

    Intern Web Developer

    CloudM

    Intern web developer contributing to the front-end redesign of CloudM's customer knowledgebase, picking up Sass and SCSS along the way.

    View role
04

Stack

Core

  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • React
  • Next.js
  • Node.js

AI

  • Agentic products
  • LLM integration
  • Prompt design
  • Guardrails

Interface

  • Tailwind
  • GSAP
  • Accessibility
  • Design systems
  • HTML & CSS

Testing

  • Vitest
  • Test strategy
  • Test automation
  • Accessibility audits

Platform

  • GitHub Actions
  • Vercel
  • Contentful
  • Web security (OWASP)
  • CI/CD
05

Kind Words

  • He is excellent at taking a topic where we have unknowns, investigating it, sharing the knowledge and then putting the learnings into practice. He has demonstrated his knowledge and experience through the way he has approached areas of ambiguity within the work we are doing, both utilising AI and creating an agentic product.”
    Senior Product Analyst
  • When assembling the team, Jake was my first choice as a developer… He took the lead in preparing and running the technical workshops and mentored the other developers on the team. Throughout this project, Jake naturally stepped into a Tech Lead role, bridging the gap between the client's requirements and technical execution.”
    Senior Product Analyst
  • The quality of your code was consistently high. I particularly appreciated your receptiveness to feedback; you integrated review points from the team effectively… Your technical planning was also a standout: you approached every task with a clear vision and a well-structured roadmap.”
    Tech Lead
  • He came into the project midway, hit the ground running and proved a valuable asset, completing a vital part of our work and allowing the team to meet their deadlines… A strength of Jake's that I have experienced on two separate clients, building completely different products, is his adaptability, as well as his knowledge.”
    Product Analyst
  • You joined the project with confidence and professionalism…”
    Senior Product Owner
  • I saw firsthand his dedication to building high quality products. He approaches development with a practical, methodical mindset and communicates effectively across the team. His ability to stay focused on the end goal while maintaining technical rigor makes him a valuable addition to any development setup.”
    Senior Developer

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Anonymised to role only. Full attributed references available on request.

06

Contact

Let’s build something together.

Employed, not currently job hunting. Find me on LinkedIn and GitHub, or drop an email. I read everything.

Send me an email
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Or copy it directly: jakeshaw121@gmail.com