I’m Jay Freestone, a product engineer based in East London. I've currently helping to build the first AI SRM at Omnea.
I’ve been building stuff on the web since 2013, where I found myself with a liberal arts degree and an aversion to pulling shots for a living — so I taught myself JavaScript instead.
Despite it originally being my escape hatch, I absolutely love what I do. I’m passionate about everything from typography and design systems through to static typing and functional programming. When I’m not drowning in YAML, I enjoy complaining about build tools and exploring new languages, frameworks and design patterns.
Whilst I wouldn’t consider myself a contrarian so much as a part-time troll, I genuinely believe that the C in CSS is a good thing, that PHP really did ‘get good’, and that micro-services are more of a cargo-cult than an architectural choice.
From grilled chicken to alternative assets
Over a decade of product engineering, digital transformation, and YAML wrangling.
- Overture
Digital design & web I started out in Shoreditch as the 'web guy', designing brand identities and brochure sites. You'd be surprised how far you can get with WordPress.
- Browser
Intelligence tools Led front-end on a suite of intelligence tools for the security sector. Due-diligence portals, interactive risk maps, complex multi-source data.
- Red Badger
Consulting across product teams Four and a half years across teams at Nando's, the Financial Times, the London Metal Exchange and more. Learnt Go, Rust and Kubernetes. I still have a fondness for ArgoCD.
- Daphne
Alternative asset platform Built out a multi-tenant fund distribution platform with NestJS, Postgres and React Router. Learned to truly hate DynamoDB.
- Omnea
AI-native procurement Today I'm working at Omnea, helping shape the next generation of AI-native procurement software.
I barely get any from humans, so yours will stand out.