RHYSCAIRNS
Frontend-leaning full stack engineer at Kingfisher — shipping production software used by 50,000+ colleagues across Europe, powered by the same work ethic that took me across the Atlantic to play.
Impact by the numbers
Real figures from production systems I own — not vanity metrics. Every number below is something colleagues touch every day.
Colleagues using what I ship
Stores running my UI nationwide
Marketplace products supported
Years shipping production code
Retail brands served
Countries in the live estate
Where I've played
Kingfisher plc
Software Engineer· Contract → Permanent (Mar 2024)
FTSE 100 · B&Q, Screwfix, Castorama
Subject matter expert on the colleague-facing side of B&Q's Marketplace Click & Collect — a UK-first for online marketplaces. Built the store-colleague UI from scratch and scaled it from a single pilot to a 300-store national network.
- Built the colleague-facing Marketplace Click & Collect UI from scratch in Vue.js + Node.js — the app store colleagues rely on daily to fulfil orders for 2,000+ third-party sellers and 2M+ products.
- Code owner on the UI and multiple backend repos with production sign-off authority before changes reach live.
- Integrated with an event-driven backend, handling the full lifecycle of a marketplace order across event types and downstream state changes.
- Runs the majority of Scrum ceremonies after the Scrum Master role was removed — planning, retros, standups — keeping delivery on track.
- On-call incident response across a platform processing tens of thousands of orders monthly across the UK, Ireland, France, Poland, Spain and Portugal.
- Mentors new engineers through pairing, code review and structured onboarding; pulled into feature design and architecture from day one.
La Fosse Futureproof
Trainee Full Stack Developer
Intensive engineering academy
Completed an intensive full-stack engineering programme, then placed directly onto Kingfisher's production team — where a permanent offer followed.
- Covered JavaScript, Node.js, ReactJS, REST APIs, relational databases and test-driven development.
- Placed directly onto a live production engineering team on completion.
Rightmove
Business & Support Analyst
UK's largest property portal
Investigated and resolved technical and data issues across the platform, collaborating with engineering to find root causes — the experience that motivated a deliberate move into software engineering.
- Diagnosed platform and data issues alongside engineering teams.
- Turned a support role into the launchpad for an engineering career.
Built to ship
Languages
Frontend
Backend
Cloud & Testing
Tooling
AI & LLMs
Ways of Working
Things I'm building
Where I explore the frontier — LLM-powered features and AI-assisted workflows, outside the constraints of a corporate codebase.
College Athlete Base
A full-stack platform helping college coaches discover athletes matching specific performance and program criteria — with LLM-powered discovery surfacing insights from structured and unstructured data.
rhyscairns.com
This site — a live sandbox for exploring frontend patterns, integrations and AI-assisted workflows outside the constraints of a corporate codebase.
Education & credentials
MSc Computer Science
Newcastle University · United Kingdom
MBA, Management Information Systems
Avila University · USA
BA Finance
University of Missouri–Kansas City · USA
Certifications
- ✓AWS Certified Developer – Associate
- ✓Site Development Associate Certification
From the pitch to production
I'm originally from Newcastle. Football took me across the Atlantic — four years of collegiate soccer in the US, then two years coaching — before I found my second obsession in software.
The way I see it, engineering is problem-solving for another job. Every line of code sits on top of a real industry you have to understand first: retail logistics, marketplace fulfilment, athlete performance. That's what I love — the excuse to keep learning entirely new fields.
The discipline, the team-first mindset and the appetite for pressure all came from sport. I just point them at a keyboard now.
Let's build something
Hiring, collaborating, or just want to talk shop about Vue, React or AI-assisted engineering? My inbox is open.