# Graeme Ellis Black Creek, BC · me@graemeellis.com · [github.com/gamellis](https://github.com/gamellis) · [linkedin.com/in/gamellis](https://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 *Jul 2026 – Present · Remote* - 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 *Oct 2022 – Jul 2026 · Remote* **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 *Jun 2021 – Oct 2022 · Remote* - 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 *Jan 2019 – Jun 2021 · Courtenay, BC* - 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 *Jan 2018 – Dec 2018 · Courtenay, BC* - 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 *Aug 2014 – Dec 2017 · Remote* - 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 *2011 – 2014 · Courtenay, BC* - Built WordPress sites and branding for local businesses. --- ## Personal Projects ### Hew — Software Factory *Feb 2026 – Present* - Built on Linear. Lets a team run development work through repeatable processes and custom factory lines — spec-driven development, bug fixes, prototyping.