Building a scalable frontend platform and development workflow.
Frontend Team Lead — SpaceDevLab, London.
- Company
- SpaceDevLab
- Role
- Frontend Team Lead
- Period
- December 2024 — Present
Context
As Frontend Team Lead at SpaceDevLab, I own the frontend platform that underpins the company’s product ecosystem — the shared UI kit, the component workflow, and the pipelines that ship them.
Some implementation details are omitted due to confidentiality.
My Role
I lead frontend platform work end to end: from design-system architecture and component tooling to the CI/CD pipelines that deliver it, working closely with design and DevOps.
Frontend Platform
I developed a new UI kit from scratch, using Figma as the single source of truth and adding a Designer Review step to the development workflow to keep implementation and design in sync.
I also migrated promotional and landing pages from plain JavaScript with Gulp to Gatsby, and updated package dependencies across almost every project in the ecosystem.
Design System
Storybook was integrated across SPA projects, with components covered by stories and Storybook deployed to corporate GitLab Pages so design and engineering could review components in isolation.
I managed Storybook coverage across 8 projects and initiated a design-consistency and technical-debt initiative that carried the UI-kit migration through to completion in 4 months.
Engineering Workflow
I established a Git flow spanning component development, QA, and release, and implemented the UI-kit release lifecycle end to end, giving every consuming project a predictable path to pick up updates.
DevOps Collaboration
Working closely with DevOps, I helped implement GitLab CI and GCP Cloud Build pipelines, contributed to development environment isolation over a corporate VPN, worked on GitLab Pages configuration, and built webhook notifications for CI/CD completion statuses.
Platform & Delivery Pipeline
A conceptual view of the design-to-delivery pipeline. This represents the shape of the workflow, not exact internal tooling.
Source of truth
Frontend platform
CI/CD
Delivery
Conceptual diagram — not an exact internal architecture.
Impact
- ArgoCD build time
- 13 min → 3 min
- UI-kit migration
- Completed in 4 months
- Storybook coverage
- 8 projects