Richard Westenra

MedShr London, UK / Remote

Front-End Engineer May 2021 – Present

• Built the front-end for MedShr Insights, an interactive dashboard that uses artificial intelligence to extract actionable insights from real-world physician data across the MedShr network. The front-end is built in Next.js with React/D3 interative charts, and allows MedShr to generate data-driven reports for clients.

McKinsey & Company / QuantumBlack London, UK

Junior Principal Front-End Engineer Jul 2018 – May 2021

Senior Consultant Front-End Engineer Feb 2017 – Jul 2018

• Created Kedro-Viz and grew it from a solo project into a complex dataviz application developed by a dedicated 6-person team, with myself as Tech Lead.
• Instrumental in open-sourcing Kedro, McKinsey's first ever open-source project - now one of the top machine-learning data pipeline frameworks, with 8.3k stars on Github.
• Rebuilt the QuantumBlack website in Gatsby.js with Contentful and CircleCI, achieving a Lighthouse score of 596/600. The new performance focus reduced mobile load time from 6 seconds to 900ms despite increased image use.
• Helped build the company's new UI component library, conducted an accessibility review across the entire library, and refactored to fix issues.
• Built bespoke dataviz dashboards as part of client engagement teams. These apps made a key contribution to the success of their engagements, and were crucial in helping clients effect change.
• Conceived and built a configurable app interface for a client project, which made it suitable for use in non-secure environments as a marketing tool. This led the app to be used as a linchpin in successful pitches worth millions of pounds.
• Encouraged QuantumBlack to contribute back to the tech community and help improve diversity by sponsoring several codebar events, and volunteered for the company's Career Ready events, visiting schools for a day to teach children to code.

DueDil London, UK

Front-End Developer Mar 2016 – Jan 2017

• Assumed ownership of complex technical projects including the new Group Graph, Ownership page, API portal, Marketing site redesign and ROI Calculator.
• Conceived and built new tools to improve developer workflow, including a new UI for Roller (our A/B testing suite) and Chroller (its Chrome extension counterpart).
• Encouraged the company to contribute back to the tech community and help improve diversity by sponsoring several codebar events, which directly contributed to at least one new hire.

Distilled London, UK

Senior Front-End Developer Jun 2015 – Feb 2016

Front-End Developer / Interactive Designer Oct 2011 – Jun 2015

• Created pieces featured in dozens of prominent publications including The Guardian, The New York Times, The Independent, The Telegraph, Mashable, The Huffington Post, Upworthy, Lifehacker, and in Visual.ly’s Top 20 Great Visualisations of 2011.
• Built HTML/CSS/JS websites, web-apps, data visualisations, infographics, quizzes, games and tools.
• Worked on projects for a variety of clients across Europe and North America including Bridgestone, Macy’s, Staples, Thomson and The Trainline.
• Worked on a Dadi award-winning project for Simply Business, and others that were shortlisted for New Media Age and Information is Beautiful awards.
• Managed and trained two junior developers.
• Designed and built the company website, including search marketing educational platform DistilledU.

Cabbage Tree Creative Christchurch, NZ

Web Designer Nov 2009 – Apr 2011

• Designed and built websites for mid-sized New Zealand tourism businesses.