Max Randle

Personal statement

Senior Front End Engineer with 8 years of experience building web applications across retail, lending, and wealth management, including platforms serving hundreds of thousands of customers. I thrive in cross-functional teams, bridging the gap between design and engineering with strong UI/UX fundamentals, semantic HTML, and accessibility. Comfortable owning back-end work when a feature calls for it. Proven ability to embed quickly into client environments, build trust, and balance technical quality with delivery commitments.

Technical skillset

TypeScript • React • Next • Node • TailwindCSS • Sass • VanillaExtract • GraphQL • REST • OpenAPI • Express • MongoDB • Playwright • React Testing Library • Jest • Vercel • GitHub Actions • Headless CMS • Accessibility (WCAG) • Semantic HTML • Design systems

Work experience

Senior Front End Software Engineer

AKQA • Auckland • April 2025 - Present

TypeScript | React | Next | TailwindCSS | VanillaExtract

• Provide engineering support for a large supermarket chain's membership platform launch, facilitating 500,000+ customer signups within the first two weeks. Ship urgent production fixes and rapidly implement changes to meet unforeseen requirements under intense, high-traffic launch conditions.

• Embed as the sole AKQA engineer within an established in-client squad, quickly building trust and becoming a key contributor in team ceremonies and technical decisions.

• Deliver critical headless CMS migration under an immovable deadline driven by expiring vendor contracts, successfully shipping to production before cutoff with zero disruption to customers.

• Drive alignment across QA discipline by advocating for a streamlined testing strategy, reducing fragile Playwright suites that blocked deployments and refocusing efforts on meaningful happy-path coverage.

• Research and evaluate agentic engineering workflows, presenting comparative analysis of competing approaches to the wider agency ahead of adoption on client projects.

• Champion continuous refactoring of tightly-coupled components in a checkout serving tens of thousands of customers daily, extracting reusable UI and utilities to reduce cost of change.

• Identify and remediate critical accessibility failures across eCommerce sites, including unusable navigation and missing skip-to-content links.

• Partner with back-end engineers during technical planning to design API contracts and map front-end/back-end interactions, ensuring alignment before implementation.

Back End Engineer (Freelance)

GuChat • Remote • August 2024 - February 2025

TypeScript | Node | Express | OpenAPI

• Sole engineer on a public-facing API for a gamified Telegram applet, keeping the service small and decoupled from surrounding systems to hold a sub 100ms response time.

• Generated a self-validating OpenAPI spec directly from the API source code so it was always guaranteed to match the implementation, maintained alongside a developer guide with embedded examples.

• Established end-to-end type safety by having the applet generate its client types from that spec, upskilling a separate contractor team on the code generation techniques involved.

• Worked directly with the client to translate business goals into technical requirements, presenting options and trade-offs to support decisions on approach.

Front End Software Engineer

Lendable (consumer lending) • London, UK • May 2023 - May 2024

TypeScript | React | Next | Sass

• Modularised core UI components in a codebase left unstable by an abandoned CSS migration, with pervasive overrides, element-level styles, and long-running production incidents. Introduced automated visual regression testing and made CSS inheritance maps to identify entrypoints for refactoring, giving the business the technical capability to take on a new whitelabel contract that the previous architecture could not have delivered.

• Restored an outdated and unmaintained API spec by reverse-engineering it from back-end source, then established a standard requiring spec changes alongside API changes. Made the spec a reliable contract between front-end and back-end teams, and adopted tooling to generate TypeScript types from it.

• Led the rapid development and deployment of a custom static careers site, ensuring zero downtime in recruitment activities while transitioning between ATS providers, delivering a brand-consistent UI under a tight deadline and without design input.

• Reduced customer onboarding steps by implementing OpenBanking integration.

• Increased customer safety by adding scam prevention features to the application flow.

• Presented regularly at Front End Guild sessions and personally recruited engineers from across the business to attend, roughly doubling regular attendance.

Front End Software Engineer

Kernel Wealth • Auckland, NZ • March 2022 - March 2023

TypeScript | React | Next | Sass | TailwindCSS | GraphQL

• Translated rigorous Figma component specs into pixel-perfect, accessible, reusable React components, negotiating with designers during product shaping where more practical implementation alternatives existed.

• Shared ownership with one other front-end engineer of how the design system was structured in the codebase, including the mapping between code-level style variables and their Figma counterparts.

• Established software patterns for form handling and branching user flows, increasing flexibility, scalability, and maintainability across the product.

• Built static marketing pages with content served from a headless CMS, using Incremental Static Regeneration to keep content current without sacrificing performance.

• Wrote end-to-end Playwright tests and configured a Bitbucket pipeline build step to run them, improving release stability.

• Built the front-end measurement layer — Mixpanel event tracking, FullStory session replay, and bespoke A/B testing capability to validate assumptions about user behaviour.

Full stack Software Engineer

Renti Ltd • Auckland, NZ • Aug 2021 - Nov 2021

React | Next | Node | Express | MongoDB | GraphQL | Sass

• Worked on the React front end, using server-side rendering for multi-step flows and forms.

• Worked across the back end, building API routes and GraphQL resolvers against existing database schemas.

• Shared responsibility for sprint planning, story pointing, work elaboration, and MVP scoping in a small team with no dedicated product role.

Front End and Automation Engineer

Probity Consulting • Auckland, NZ • Jul 2018 - Sept 2020

Quanton Ltd (business acquisition) • Auckland, NZ • Oct 2020 - Aug 2021

React | UiPath | .NET Core | SQL

• Workshopped directly with the client to scope and build a web portal for truck drivers to manage shipping data, covering complex forms, file upload/download, CRUD operations, authentication, and user permissions.

• Designed, built, and deployed automation solutions against large-scale ERP systems, including a fully autonomous UiPath bot for Zespri that scraped external carrier websites and entered shipping updates into SAP. Worked in secure government environments handling sensitive payroll and medical data.

• Conducted technical interviews and candidate selection, and trained junior staff.

Personal life

Please see my portfolio website maxrandle.co.nz for more about me.

Qualifications