What Do You Do? Frontend Engineer

Tell us a bit about what you do

I’m a Frontend Engineer in one of our Card squads. I work on our React Native mobile app, helping users onboard and use our Credit Builder Card product. The work is varied and interesting, ranging from creating new features, monitoring existing features, fixing bugs, to contributing towards card strategy–all in a highly collaborative way. 

The team is super cross-functional. I have access to every kind of expertise I need–whether that be my fellow frontend engineers, backend engineers, analysts, user researchers, visual designers, content designers, or our product manager–we have everything we need to be autonomous and successful.

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How did you first get into your field?

I did a Computer Science (and Electronic Music) degree a long time ago, and then got a job in a violin shop–probably not the start you were expecting 😂

I finally came back to digital, working my way round the Scrum team, mainly in user experience and service design for a good 10 years. Before returning to engineering, I did a bootcamp with Makers which refreshed my skills. 

So, I’m a bit of an anomaly in having done both a degree and a bootcamp. Hot take: in my opinion, the bootcamp was much more relevant and better value for money, although going to uni is fun for other reasons.

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What's your favorite project that you've worked on?

Honestly, I’ve loved all the projects I’ve worked on at Cleo. Examples of things I’ve built since working here include direct deposits, onboarding improvements, cash advance journeys, card replacement. I’ve worked on all kinds of stuff that’s useful to our users and good for business.

It’s incredible how fast something can go from idea to execution at Cleo, and I find it so satisfying to see users use what I’ve built. The turnaround time from idea to production is literally weeks, which is not something I’ve experienced in other companies. 

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How has AI impacted your work?

I use AI in a number of ways day to day, to help me generate SQL queries for my monitoring dashboards, to help me debug code, to help make my writing snappier. 

Cleo actually pays for our Chat GPT 4 subscriptions which is an amazing perk in my opinion.

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Where can we find you when you're not at work?

At home juggling two children (not literally...)

I also love to play piano and make music.

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Any advice for potential Cleo applicants?

This is an amazing environment to work in. Our values and engineering principles are at the heart of what we do, so make sure you think of examples of how you align with them. 

The market is tough at the moment, so I would lean towards preparing more than you would usually have to. Good luck and I hope to see you in the welcome notices 😄