Work · Lead Full Stack Engineer
Soil Scout.
Leading The Hub.
- Role
- Full Stack → Lead Full Stack Engineer
- When
- Oct 2024 – Jun 2026
- Team
- In-house developers and external consultants
- Stack
- Django, React, PostgreSQL, TimescaleDB, GCP
The product
Sensors in the ground, data on a screen.
Soil Scout makes wireless sensors, the scouts, that are buried in the soil and keep sending measurements. The Hub is the web app where customers see that data.
I joined as a Full Stack Engineer in October 2024 and became the lead a year later. I led development of The Hub, stepped up to guide our engineering work and look after the core infrastructure behind it, which handled more than 6.5 million sensor uploads every hour.
What I did
Four parts of one job.
Turning ideas into features
I was the person between product and code: listening to what the business wanted, working out how to build it across the stack, and keeping in-house developers and external consultants pointed the same way.
Building across the whole stack
I designed and shipped features end to end in Python (Django) and React, mostly around making real-time sensor telemetry readable for the people using The Hub.
Keeping it fast and stable
Tracking down production bugs, tuning the PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB data pipelines on GCP, and keeping deployments boring with GitHub Actions and Ansible.
Hiring the next developers
I built our technical recruitment pipeline from scratch: practical coding assignments instead of puzzles, and interviews focused on how candidates think and collaborate.
What it taught me
Leading is mostly communication.
Going from developer to lead changed what a good day looked like. It stopped being about how much code I wrote and started being about whether the right thing got built, whether production stayed stable, and whether the people around me could do their best work.
That's the experience I'm now putting into Tiny Tarrasque, and what I'd bring to an early team.