Freelance Software Developer, UK
Your product delivered by one principal engineer, not a team you have to manage.
I'm Hugh Grigg, a UK freelance and contract software developer. I build complete systems: cloud infrastructure, back-end services, APIs, the front end, and the deployment pipelines that get them live.
Two kinds of project I take on:
- A minimum viable product you can launch with. Delivered end to end, to a standard you won't have to throw away six months later.
- A project your roadmap can't reach yet. Delivered sooner than it could be otherwise, without waiting for internal capacity to free up.
I've been doing this for 13 years, at companies including Fanalysis, Freetrade and Octopus Energy, in roles up to Principal Engineer. I hold three AWS certifications, two of them at Professional level.
How the work gets delivered
Moving fast now turns into cost later unless a few things are done properly from the start. These are the ones that pay for themselves immediately, so they aren't negotiable on my projects:
- One person accountable for the whole thing. You get progress and decisions rather than a team to coordinate, and there is nobody for a problem to be handed off to.
- Releasing from the first week. Getting a change in front of users stays routine instead of becoming an event you have to plan around.
- Tests that cover how the system really behaves, so a change late in the project doesn't quietly break what already worked. I've released open source tooling to make that kind of testing practical.
- Infrastructure defined as code, so your cloud setup can be rebuilt or handed to someone else, and isn't something only I understand.
None of it is ceremony. Each one makes the next change cheaper, which is the only thing that matters while you're still finding out what your product should be.
Kensio Software Expertise
Benefit from my software development expertise in:
Where I've delivered
Delivery across fintech, energy, medtech, e-commerce and early stage products. The most recent work:
- Fanalysis — Staff Software Engineer, on back-end, platform and infrastructure engineering for a new product, using serverless AWS, TypeScript and CDK.
- HOA Mailers — contract engineer across cloud infrastructure, back end and front end, in Go, TypeScript, Next.js and PostgreSQL.
- Octopus Energy and Bulb Energy — contract engineer on back-end and platform work, serverless and microservice systems in Python on AWS and GCP.
- Freetrade — Principal Software Engineer, among the first five engineers at the company. I built their subscription payment system and their stock market FIX trading integration, and a testing framework that made their CI pipelines faster and more accurate.
Earlier work includes back-end engineering at uMed in medtech and four years on e-commerce and social platforms at LoveCrafts. There is more on all of it on the blog.
Kensio Software Technologies
I can build your custom software solution using technologies including:
What colleagues have said
You've probably been the most responsive engineer I've worked with and you always reply straight away with very helpful responses… you were so quick to implement the things I needed.
It is intuitive, beautifully separated, easy to expand and in general, it is just a pleasure to look at the code.