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

Envato is a leading creative marketplace and community platform.
As Engineering Manager, I lead and support a team of engineers to deliver innovative solutions for creative professionals worldwide.

The work I've done with my team comes under three key themes - Value, Velocity and Visibility:

• Value - I worked with my team to identify and align around our core mission: protecting and increasing revenue. This clarity has enabled us to make better prioritization decisions and focus our efforts where they matter most.
• Velocity - One issue identified early on with my team was that our throughput was low. I coached the team on breaking down work into logical chunks, improving our cycle time and feeding our ability to deliver customer value faster.
• Visibility - I put tooling in place to give the team visibility of our DORA metrics and our WIP. This visibility had a notable impact on our ability to see where our bottlenecks were, and make improvements to how we were delivering.

The main piece of work I led was an AI-powered conversational search project. This required adapting to a new experimental approach - shipping experiments quickly, and iterating based on feedback and analytics in production. We also had to learn a lot about working with different AI models, and how to engineer prompts effectively.
I've also worked with the wider Engineering Management group to identify and address systemic bottlenecks, including optimizing our support and maintenance processes.

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 key responsibilities at Fergus are People, Delivery and Engineering Practice:

• People - I empower my teams to do their best work. Self selection is a good example of this. I prepared and led an exercise to have our engineers organise themselves into teams. They had the freedom to pick their best fit, and we all had to work together to find a structure that would be best for Fergus.
  This kind of structure and autonomy has led to happy, engaged engineers. My teams score the highest on our internal eNPS evaluations.
• Delivery - I work with senior leadership to prioritise our workstreams. This means giving realistic estimates, and providing clarity on the tradeoffs we make.
  I advocate for technical debt work alongside features, and achieve the right level of compromise. I am proud to have been able to address longstanding technical issues, while still achieving product goals.
• Engineering Practice - A large part of my role has been to identify areas of inefficiency or frustration and improve them.
  One example of this was leading the charge to move from two-weekly production deploys, to an on-demand CI/CD process.
  This has improved the speed and quality of delivery, led to higher customer satisfaction, and happier engineers.

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:

• Technical - I have an all-round understanding of various software technologies. Across my career I have worked with Java, JavaScript, PHP and C#, along with a number of AWS services.
• Coaching - I am a professional coach with my internal team members, as well as outside of work. This means looking at career plans, unpacking difficult career problems, and identifying networking and sponsorship opportunities. I take pride in helping others grow.
• Communication - I’m a proficient written and verbal communicator. I regularly present at internal company presentations, and have done a number of conference talks.
• Incident management - I take pride in my ability to remain calm and act pragmatically when incidents happen. This includes resolving incidents quickly, making sure the right stakeholders are informed, and ensuring post-incident activities are followed through.
• Conflict resolution - I am good at working through conflicts within my team and working towards solutions. This leans on my strong empathy and listening skills.

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:

• Tech Rally NZ, 16 May 2025, Wellington - Email Sucks - A story of solving an email deliverability problem
• 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