GRAEME ELLIS ============ Black Creek, BC | me@graemeellis.com | 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 --------------------------------------- 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.