Graeme Ellis
Black Creek, BC · [email protected] · github.com/gamellis · linkedin.com/in/gamellis
Frontend engineer and UX/UI designer for the Albertsons AI shopping assistant, taking it from prototype to production — first as the manager of a brilliant team of engineers, now as a staff engineer building alongside them. Product-focused Staff Engineer with 13+ years of experience, growing from freelance web development through UX design and front-end engineering into technical leadership at a Fortune 50 company. Designs what should exist, negotiates with what already does, and opens the PR. Twice that work helped sell the company — Mealime to Albertsons, Ascend to Tithely.
Skills
- Languages
- TypeScript, JavaScript, Ruby
- Frontend
- React, Next.js, React Native, Tailwind CSS, React Aria, Emotion, Framer Motion
- Backend
- Node.js, Ruby on Rails, Payload CMS
- Databases
- PostgreSQL, MongoDB, SQLite · ORMs: Prisma, Drizzle, ActiveRecord
- Cloud & Infra
- AWS S3, Vercel, Cloudflare Workers + Durable Objects, Docker, Terraform
- CI/CD & Testing
- GitHub Actions, CircleCI · Playwright, Maestro, Jest, Vitest, RSpec
- AI / Agents
- Vercel AI SDK, rubyLLM, MCP
- Design
- UX/UI, design systems, prototyping, accessibility (WCAG 2.2, ARIA)
- Leadership
- Technical hiring and interview design, agile facilitation, mentoring, product/design partnership
Experience
Albertsons Companies — Staff Engineer
- Lead front-end engineer on the Albertsons AI shopping assistant — chat UI, mobile-responsive layouts, product recommendation carousels, embedded mode, workflow inputs, and shopping list integration on Next.js 15, React 18, and TypeScript.
- Solved the hard mobile problems: iOS keyboard interactions, embedded webview behaviour, and sheet/popover state management.
Albertsons Companies — Software Engineering Manager
Team Leadership
- Managed a team of engineers and long-term contractors — people who trust each other to do the right thing, say out loud when they're struggling, and still make each other laugh.
- Co-developed the team's technical hiring interview process, staffing the build of the Albertsons AI shopping assistant.
- Stepped in to own the team's agile process and establish new bug-reporting procedures when the scrum master took an unplanned leave.
Shipped Products
- Designed and built Plan AI's chat UI, mobile-responsive layouts, product recommendation carousels, embedded mode, workflow inputs, and shopping list integration — proof of concept to production on Next.js 15, React 18, and TypeScript — while managing the team building it.
- Led Shop Your Recipe — a computer vision + LLM pipeline that lets customers photograph a cookbook page or handwritten recipe note and receive a structured, shoppable recipe. The team's first LLM-powered feature; kept the build moving and ran the schedule.
- Shipped a Payload CMS + Next.js 15 + React 19 content platform to replace the rigid Mealime-era recipe CMS. Authors can now write looser recipe structures with tiered, product-matched ingredient substitutions.
- Owned the design and full Next.js front-end for DIRM, Albertsons' recipe and menu planning platform, using React Aria accessibility primitives and TanStack Query.
- Carried the meal planning app across React Native major version upgrades (0.73 → 0.77); adopted Maestro E2E test framework; fixed iOS native deprecations in AppDelegate.
Core Product Monorepo
- Maintained a 1,000+ commit Lerna TypeScript monorepo spanning a meal-planning SDK, REST API, web app, and mobile client — with a private GitHub NPM registry, ESLint (sonarjs + unicorn), and Prettier with Tailwind class sorting.
- Authored the team's PR Reviewers Guide, pull request templates, and AGENTS.md coding guidelines.
- Moved the product suite onto React Aria Components for keyboard and screen-reader support; selected to present at company-wide Engineering Excellence – UI Tech Talks. Introduced TanStack Query as the team's data-fetching standard.
Developer Tooling & Open Source
- Designed and shipped demo-recorder — a cross-repo Playwright + Maestro CLI that lets every app team commit versioned demo flows alongside features.
- Forked and updated blurrily Ruby C-extension gem for Ruby 3.3.4/3.4: patched map_ext.c, updated gemspec and runtime deps, added GitHub Actions CI.
Albertsons Companies — Design Engineer → Sr. Design Engineer
- Designer and lead front-end engineer across web and React Native for the Albertsons meal planning product — owning the implementation and the UX decisions alongside the design team.
- Designed and built budget mode — lets shoppers set a grocery budget and see projected spend updates in real time as they select recipes, shipped across web and React Native. Started as a hackathon project; leadership picked it for production and recognized the work.
Mealime — User Experience Designer
- Designed and built much of the consumer-facing UI for the Mealime iOS and Android app in React Native + TypeScript, across 98 merged PRs — including the account and registration flow and the subscription flow.
- Built the carousel-based auto-meal-planner including an ingredient constraint picker, a food-waste savings display, Lottie-driven state animations, and staggered card-entry transitions.
- Designed and built the mealime.com marketing site. Led an overhaul of the app's typography, color, and UX — the shopping list, meal plan history, and the concierge plan builder — that helped make Mealime an acquisition target for Albertsons.
Ascend Collective Inc. — UI/UX Design and Development
- Designed and built a website block engine — a page builder that let non-technical customers compose pages from content blocks. The block engine helped land Ascend's acquisition by Tithely.
Loam Studios Inc. — Partner, UI/UX Design and Development
- Partner at a studio that helped academic researchers turn their research into products.
- Built content management systems and news article distribution platforms for clients including the Network for Business Sustainability (nbs.net), MIT Sloan Business Sustainability, and The Embedding Project.
Freelance Web Developer
- Built WordPress sites and branding for local businesses.
Personal Projects
Hew — Software Factory
- Built on Linear. Lets a team run development work through repeatable processes and custom factory lines — spec-driven development, bug fixes, prototyping.