James Espie

Hi, I'm James.

I’m an engineering manager based in Tauranga, New Zealand. I love building resilient and performant engineering teams. I'm at my best when I can see engineers grow and make a difference in the world around them.

Experience

Fergus is New Zealand's leading trade job management solution.
As Engineering Manager, I support and set the direction of the engineering teams at Fergus. I have five direct reports, and a total team of approximately twenty engineers.

My time at Fergus included:

• Establishing a new cross functional team structure within engineering. This included two rounds of team self selection, where our engineers organised themselves into teams. This was a challenging but rewarding initiative.
• Working with senior leadership to prioritise projects. A large part of my role was learning to advocate for technical improvements, while still building new and exciting features. I learned a lot about communication and compromise.
• Writing and publishing a career ladder for our engineering team.
• I have worked with our leads to identify career growth opportunities, both for themselves and their team members. I advocated for promotions, and performance managed those who needed it.
• Implemented and managed an on call process for our engineering team.
• Led process improvement, including moving our team from weekly deployments to on-demand continuous deployments.
• Regularly organising and hosting company wide events such as our monthly company demo.
• Managed the team through several serious incidents, including security issues, and email deliverability problems.

I would summarise my time at Fergus by saying I’ve been instrumental in building a unique, positive, blameless engineering culture. I am very proud of the team I’ve created, and how I have seen them grow and be able to deliver.

UneeQ provide a platform for building and hosting Digital Humans - lifelike digital brand ambassadors. My responsibility was to work with teams to bake some quality into their existing processes, and to increase the focus on testing as a skill.

Some of my contributions:

• Coached the engineering team to focus on collaboration between testers and engineers. We saw significant improvements as we paired to assess the risks as we were building.
• I implemented three new automated test suites from scratch. API tests, E2E tests and visual regression checks.
• I created Slack bots and other automations, to increase visibility of changes during deployment. This enabled the team to move faster and have a better overall picture of what was happening.
• Advocating for testability early in the lifecycle as we built new features.

In addition to these, I was also responsible for up-skilling the team by organising (and sometimes speaking at) regular lunch-n-learn sessions. I also acted as a mentor for one of the other quality specialists in the team.

Pushpay provide giving and engagement solutions for churches and charities. My core responsibilities were:

• Working with developers to test payment pipeline features.
• Unblocking and enabling other testers, by sharing technical and product knowledge.
• Implementing innovative test ideas. I introduced bug bashes to Pushpay, a practice they still regularly use today.
• Creating and implementing automated tests across a number of layers.

I also ran training sessions for other team members, was a key part of recruitment for roles across the company, and mentored an intern in 2019.

Education

University of Auckland - BSc in Computer Science, graduated 2003

Skills and Qualities

My key strengths are:

• Coaching team members to develop their strengths, and improve their weaknesses.
• Logical and methodical in my thought processes.
• Creative, and able to think outside the box.
• A good communicator, both written and verbal.
• Able to hold a strong opinion, but humble enough to accept others opinions.
• Personable - people like working with me.

Presentations and Publications

Presentations

I’m an active member of the software community, and enjoy presenting and sharing learnings.
Some of the presentations or events I have spoken at include:

• NZ Testing Conference, 1 July 2022, Wellington - Cooking up a great tester.
• Ministry of Testing Auckland, 25 March 2021, Auckland - You might not need to automate that! (not recorded)
• TestFlix, 28 November 2020, International (Online) - Building a Professional Network.
• WeTest Conference, 25 & 27 October 2018, Auckland & Wellington - Avoiding cataclysm as a change catalyst (with Daniel Barrow - not recorded).
• Summer of Tech Bootcamp, 30 August 2018, Auckland - MasterTest: A MasterChef style introduction to Testing.

I'm also lucky enough to have had the chance to host events. I was the MC at TestBash NZ in both 2019 and 2020, and one of the hosts for TestBash Home 2020, 2021 and 2022.

Publications

I have co-hosted a YouTube series, Tech Engineering Lounge, with Camy Bhandari.
I sporadically publish a newsletter, Pie-Mail, discussing engineering and leadership challenges.
I contributed a chapter to the book An Exploration of Testers compiled by Dr. Lee Hawkins.
For two years, I was the co-host of the Super Testing Bros Podcast, supported by the Ministry of Testing.

References

Available upon request

Contact

• james@jpie.nz
• LinkedIn

Download a PDF version of this CV