Joel Carr
Product Engineer
London, UK
- https://github.com/joelcarr
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/carrjoel/
- https://bsky.app/profile/joelcarr.co.uk
Product Engineer with 13+ years of full-stack experience, returning to hands-on IC work at a pivotal moment in the AI evolution. Passionate about removing friction in high-pressure environments — whether eliminating toil from developer workflows or helping engineering teams respond faster when things go wrong. Experienced building platform-scale systems at the Financial Times and currently building agentic AI tooling for automated code migration.
Technical Skills
| Languages | Node, TypeScript, React, HTML, CSS, GraphQL |
| Infrastructure & Cloud | AWS (Lambda, ECS, S3), Fastly CDN, Redis, Cloudflare, Doppler |
| Observability | Splunk, Grafana, Amplitude, Sentry |
| AI / Tooling | Agentic AI pipelines, AST codemods, CLI tooling, CircleCI |
Experience
Technical Lead — Financial Times
Mar 2022 – Present
- Building an agentic AI migration pipeline for the Origami Design System: breaking changes are packaged as CLI-triggered codemods + AI prompts, allowing an AI agent to autonomously detect, resolve, and raise PRs — turning multi-day manual upgrades into automated workflows across the FT estate.
- Rebuilding the design system from a legacy component library to an extensible, token-based architecture, enabling greater consistency and faster iteration across the FT product portfolio.
- Automated secret management migration from legacy provider to Doppler — reduced migration time across 100+ systems from 2 days per system to 0.5 days, saving ~150 engineer-days.
- Replaced flaky test suites with purposeful feedback loops in production-like environments, restoring CI signal confidence across engineering teams.
- Led FT.com platform team owning routing and caching architecture (Fastly CDN, API Gateway, load balancers) and developer tooling integrating content APIs — enabling full-stack product teams to focus on reader experience.
- Defined roadmap and strategy for multiple teams lacking product direction, creating engineering autonomy through clear vision and measurable outcomes.
Senior Engineer — Financial Times
Mar 2021 – Mar 2022
- Worked in the Accounts team handling new subscription terms across regions, collaborating with Membership Platform teams on complex customer journey changes.
- Introduced API contract testing between teams — enabling parallel development of customer journeys while backend APIs were still being built, reducing integration risk and delays.
Contract Senior Engineer — Joel Carr Ltd
Jan 2016 – Feb 2021
- Delivered component libraries and full-stack features for clients including Barnardo's, The Body Coach (Joe Wicks), and Nokia across Ruby on Rails and Drupal 8.
- Coached Barnardo's engineering team on modern web practices: accessibility, performance testing, and validating solutions with real service users.
Engineer — Dare / RefME / Livestax
Jul 2012 – Jan 2016
- Shipped product features at two startups and a creative ad agency, building under tight deadlines in fast-moving environments.
Education
BA (Hons) First Class — Interactive Media Production · 2009 – 2012 Bournemouth University