Sean Cansdale

Looking for work

Sean Cansdale

I'm a software engineering manager with over twenty years building and modernising large-scale web platforms. Teams get stuck for different reasons — the codebase, infrastructure cost, a fragile pipeline, or how the organisation works. I focus on the thing that's actually slowing people down.

Recent work has included owning technical roadmaps, cutting six-figure tooling bills, migrating platforms to modern stacks, and leading delivery that had to keep moving.

Experience

Senior Engineering Manager · UNiDAYS — Marketplace · 2 years

Owned technical roadmap, delivery, and people leadership across multiple product teams in the Marketplace organisation.

  • Led up to 21 engineers across software engineering (associate through staff) and quality engineering.
  • Championed Cursor with engineering teams and secured budget for team adoption.
  • Encouraged engineering to improve marketplace search with AWS Bedrock — AI-generated keywords by brand (e.g. Nike → trainers, shorts).
  • Built React Native capability through structured upskilling and targeted hiring.
  • Led Iterable → Bloomreach migration across ingestion, events, GDPR, and catalogue sync.
  • Introduced Nx, onboarding improvements, and shared engineering standards.
  • Improved frontend developer experience by removing CORS disruption in local development (Caddy).
  • Introduced shared EM templates for the management team — career framework tracking, Career Anchors, and related tooling.
  • Ran a code bonfire that removed 40k+ lines of code and retired at least two redundant systems and infrastructure.

Engineering Manager · Zoopla (Houseful) · 5 years

Engineering Manager for Zoopla website teams — people leadership, plus tech lead responsibility for the greenfield frontend foundation.

  • Led teams of up to 17 engineers; coached technical leads and aspiring principals.
  • Alongside EM work, acted as tech lead for a new frontend built from the ground up — Next.js, React, Emotion, testing approach, and related standards.
  • Migrated frontend infra from self-managed AWS to Vercel — ~£100k annual saving.
  • Replaced New Relic with CloudWatch — six-figure licensing cost removed.
  • Designed microfrontend delivery on AWS S3; rewrote GitLab CI/CD for quality gates.
  • Optimised Python property ingestion (30M+ properties) from days to hours.

What I'm looking for

Engineering management roles — hybrid in the UK — where I can help teams ship reliably and grow.

Technologies

  • Engineering leadership
  • React / Next.js
  • TypeScript
  • Platform modernisation
  • Microfrontends
  • AWS / Vercel
  • CI/CD & DORA metrics
  • React Native
  • Python

Languages: JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Perl. Frontend: React, Next.js, React Native, Cypress, Jest. Cloud: AWS, Vercel, ECS, Docker, GitHub, GitLab CI/CD, CloudWatch. Platforms: REST APIs, microfrontends, Nx, Segment, Optimizely.

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