Engineering Work That Ships

Tech Lead on a large-scale WooCommerce platform for the US market, coordinating a small cross-functional team (front-end developer, Zoho integrator, project manager) and reporting directly to the business owner. Investigated the existing, undocumented codebase and rebuilt it around OOP/SOLID principles, producing project documentation for both engineering and management use. Optimized the Priority1 API integration, drastically cutting API consumption costs, and built a custom stock-monitoring feature tying the site to Zoho. Set up a Docker development environment kept in sync with production, CI/CD pipelines for shared hosting, and a Git workflow with structured code reviews (Jira, Bitbucket) — alongside hardening security with structured logging and integrating AI tools (Claude) into the daily workflow, including design-token extraction to speed up Figma-to-WordPress theme conversion.

Lead engineer responsible for a global e-commerce platform for buying, selling, and exchanging luxury watches across multiple regions. Led a 3-person development team (self, a front-end developer, a Laravel back-end developer). Designed a scalable WooCommerce architecture with Laravel handling extended business logic, hosted on AWS EC2, with CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows managed through Bitbucket. Reorganized the site's information architecture, converted a PSD design into responsive HTML, and future-proofed an incorrectly structured legacy project for migration — without a full rewrite.

Performance-oriented WordPress architecture without page builders; A/B testing with LaunchDarkly, Microsoft Clarity, flight-data provider integrations (Aviation Edge, Avinode).

WordPress Theme Developer (contract) at WPZOOM Holding B.V., working closely and directly with the company owner. Proposed and implemented new features for Inspiro — one of WPZOOM's most popular commercial WordPress themes, widely regarded as one of the most-used themes for photo and video portfolios — guided by ongoing competitor analysis. Built both admin-side and front-end functionality on the WordPress Customizer API, a legacy but still foundational API, carefully preserving existing implementations for a large, active customer base. Working with Git submodules and WordPress.org product standards for the first time — a notably different discipline than client-project work — gave a clear, practical sense of the pace and expectations of the WordPress theme marketplace.

A modern WordPress starter theme framework, built from scratch after one too many bloated, outdated starter setups — a Vite build pipeline, SCSS, ES6+, and a clear src/ structure. Free and open source; the same workflow used to rebuild wpforpro.com's own theme.