Engineering Manager, Design Systems Manchester, United Kingdom
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About
Engineering manager for the Fable Design System at Sainsbury's, after progressing from software engineer to senior engineer and then into leadership. I build accessible frontend platforms and scale a multi-brand design system across web, iOS and Android. I manage the engineers, and bring AI-assisted development workflows into how we build.
I care about UI that stays accessible and consistent as it grows: reusable components, design tokens, and the documentation and workflows that get a design system actually adopted. I've worked across JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS and Node.js, and I still like building things end to end. This CV is one of them.
Experience
Engineering Manager, Fable Design System
Sainsbury's Digital, Tech and Data March 2024 – Present
Moved from software engineering into management, now responsible for the engineers, the technical direction and scaling a multi-brand design system across web, iOS and Android.
Lead engineering for Fable adoption across Sainsbury's and Argos. In 2025 the team shipped 77 releases, migrated 40 applications to Fable v5 and cut the number of design tokens by 42%
Took Fable beyond web, bringing design tokens and typography to iOS and Android
Helped introduce the Fable MCP package in January 2026, so AI-assisted tools work from approved components and design tokens
Lead work on AI-assisted engineering workflows, design-system analytics, platform migrations and adoption measurement
Manage engineers day to day, including recruitment and colleague development
Coordinated the Luna registry migration across the organisation in March and April 2026: found the affected repositories, communicated the risks and tracked it to completion
Senior Software Engineer
Sainsbury's Digital, Tech and Data July 2021 – March 2024
Took on technical leadership, owning more of the engineering standards, shared components and design-system adoption
Advised engineers and delivery teams on implementation, accessibility, reusable components and migration planning
Worked with engineering, product and design to turn design-system strategy into technical plans teams could build on
Grew into stakeholder management, delivery coordination and mentoring alongside the engineering work
Software Engineer
Sainsbury's March 2019 – July 2021
Built and maintained customer-facing web experiences on shared component libraries
Contributed reusable components, design tokens, accessibility improvements and engineering documentation
Kept the UI consistent alongside designers, product managers and engineers
Learned automated testing, CI/CD, Agile delivery and production support
Front End Developer
Moriyama March 2014 – March 2019
Agency work for a mix of client brands.
Built front ends for clients including PwC, PPG, Antiques Trade Gazette, Towergate Insurance and Sodexo
Worked in JavaScript and early TypeScript, building with Angular
Did a lot of the design work in code, alongside the front-end development
Shaped the CMS architecture on Umbraco, and earned official Umbraco level 1 and 2 certifications
Trainee Web Designer, then New Media Designer and Developer
Liverpool City Council (LDL) October 2011 – March 2014
Practically a front-end developer, before the term was widely adopted.
Designed and mocked up pages in Photoshop and Illustrator
Built the HTML and CSS templates that the .NET developers worked from
Put together front-end build tooling in Gulp, and added interactivity in JavaScript
Worked on internal Umbraco sites and applications, including the Liverpool City Council intranet, the LDL intranet and recruitment websites
First exposure to accessibility
Projects
This CV
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