From being on placement to being a lead in less than a decade
I joined Screwfix in 2012 as a placement student, during my sandwich year at university. After finishing my degree in 2014, I joined as an junior developer and never looked back in my career. I grew more confident in my technical abilities and this was reflected in moving from junior engineer to mid-level and eventually senior engineer. During this time, I moved over to Kingfisher (the parent company) and continued growing within the engineering pathway. Once I reached senior, I took on more team and people responsibilities, helping and leading in areas of both technology and people growth. On top of this, I took on responsibilities as a technical lead, although never formally held the position, supporting a project team in their development and delivery and owning the technical solution that was being developed.
With this experience, I decided to move over to help people rather than technology. I currently hold the position of Lead Engineer, working with people as a support to them in their career growth, their day to day administration, and general wellbeing. I then can apply myself to resourcing capabilities and focusing on the larger organisation items within Kingfisher Digital Engineering.
I support engineers in developing themselves and supporting their grow
As a Lead Engineer, I describe myself as the support to a collection of engineers. I look after their wellbeing, general administration, and supporting their career growth. Using servant leadership traits, it allows for continuous support for these team members, so they can develop the best technical solutions for Kingfisher. Thus in turn, this allows Kingfisher banners to provide for their customers, be in store, warehouse or the website. On top of this, Lead Engineers hold relationships with other third party engineering providers, on which we manage to allow additional support to the development speed of programmes and projects. With this comes resourcing capability requirements to support the programmes, while balancing this with career aspirations of many different engineers.
Outside of these individuals, as a Lead Engineer, I help engineering manager with strategy and larger ideas outside of day to day corporate delivery. This can be anything from recruitment, talent development, several year plan for engineering growth or career pathway development and support. Each day is exceptionally varied and no two are the same.
Ability to help and support people to excel at what they do
A significant proportion of my role enables me to do what I am good at; helping and supporting people in achieving their goals. This varies between all sets of people that I interact with and can be everything from supporting line reports in their career growth, when they have problems and troubles or completing administration to enable them to do their job as quickly as possible. Resourcing and supporting projects then can vary from ensuring we have the right people on the right project, talking through programmes around their requirements and suggesting engineering enhancements on how to get their requirements across the line. In terms of engineering strategies and supporting the engineering leadership team, this can be anything that is required. Supporting the growth of engineering through changing recruitment strategies, figuring out the skillsets of engineers and sourcing applications to support their growth has been just some of the items I have tackled.
The work I get involved with is varied and involves a lot of helping people with their problems. As an engineer, your sole purpose is to solve the problems of the business that they have provided for you. As a Lead Engineer, I have taken my technical ability to solve problems and get to apply it to people in supporting their wellbeing, thoughts and dreams which is exceptionally satisfactory.
Openness, honesty and a little bit of kindness goes a long way
There isn't enough kindness in this world generally, but as a person that has to recruit is quite clearly obvious in most interviews when you are being your authentic self. As an engineer, you would often exclaim at the stereotypical management that you would hear about on the internet. As I grew into the position that you would hear stories around, and developing myself, I realised that all those are based on trying to second guess the answers that you think the interviewer would want to hear. Generally, I want to just find out about the person; approach an interview as an opportunity to show who you are, what you enjoy and what you are good at. Be open and honest with your answers and don't forget that an interview process is a two way process.
Solutionised and created of the current standing component library
In my role as a technical lead and senior engineer, I solutionised, created and lead the team to continue creating a component library. For those, who don't know what that is, it's a front end collection of components that mean that we have consistent designs and reuse across the websites. Specifically, in the area of merchandising for B&Q and Castorama websites, it means consistency across all the visual elements that people see, while creating clear templates for merchandisers to use to create clear web pages for the website. The part I am most proud of though is that many different component libraries and design systems have come and gone within the code base of Kingfisher and yet after many years this is still around.
What I am even more proud of was the team that we developed. Despite being spread over two countries, have roots in several different backgrounds, we created a super friendly and engagement atmosphere. Several team members had promotions and excelled during their time in the team which included the pandemic. It was my personal first step into support people as well as technology and enabled me to make the decision to step into the job that I have now.
