Jacob Rees
Download CVGitHub
Jacob Rees

Jacob Rees

Frontend Engineer

Durham, England

500K+
Students Reached
30+
Universities
160+
Shops

My Story

I've been hooked on building things with code since secondary school Computer Science. What started as curiosity became a drive to make things that work well and feel right to use.

After studying Digital Media at Leeds (graduating with a First in my final coding project), I've spent the last 4 years shipping React and TypeScript products across higher education and e-commerce. At Pavers, I built a WCAG 2.1 AA component library powering 160+ retail shops across 5+ brands. At Revolution Viewing, I work on Vepple, a platform serving 30+ UK universities. I led front-end and UX on the original Vue.js build, then spearheaded the ground-up rebuild to React, Next.js 16, and TypeScript with the CTO and Product Manager, and mentored a junior engineer to independent delivery in 4 weeks.

What keeps me interested is the mix of visual polish and technical problem-solving. Some days I'm tweaking animations and getting interactions just right, other days I'm designing an A/B experiment or tracking down a weird accessibility bug.

I bridge design and engineering, shipping accessible and measurable products with teams that ship work they're proud of.

Professional Journey

Experience

4 years building products used by millions, from virtual campus platforms to e-commerce solutions.

  • Role & Company

    Period

  • Frontend Engineer

    Revolution Viewing / Vepple

    Frontend EngineerFeb 2026 - Present
    Junior Frontend DeveloperMar 2023 - Feb 2026

    Drive frontend and product-design delivery for Vepple, a personalised virtual campus platform trusted by 30+ universities and 500K+ students, across Vue/GraphQL and Next.js/TypeScript/Payload CMS rebuilds with CI/CD and automated testing.

    Designed and built an Events Management System with Firebase real-time chat, timezone-aware schedules and 1-second status updates, increasing views/session by 108%.

    Built GrowthBook A/B testing and GDPR-compliant GTM/GA4 tracking; ran 15 production experiments for 20K+ users and increased click rate by 19.2%.

    Engineered Mapbox GL JS Explore by Map with personalised filters, directions and GPS wayfinding; benchmarked outcomes include 21 pages/session, +68% page depth and +64% engagement time.

    Enhanced WCAG 2.2 AA Guided Tours with live captions, ambassador content and Content Spots; Guided Tour users see +65% pages/session, +50% engagement time and 4.3-star satisfaction.

    Mentored a junior engineer through code reviews and pair programming, ramping them to independent feature delivery within 4 weeks.

    Technologies: Vue, GraphQL, Next.js, TypeScript, Payload CMS, Firebase, Mapbox GL JS, GrowthBook, GTM, GA4

    Mar 2023 - Present

  • Web Developer

    Pavers

    Designed and built a WCAG 2.1 AA component library of 75+ React/Shopify Liquid components across 5+ brands for Pavers, using Storybook and Sanity CMS to support rapid page customisation.

    Integrated retail-media sponsored placements into Algolia search across a 10,000+ product catalogue, increasing conversion by 11.4%.

    Combined Lucky Orange session data with a weather API to deliver location-aware recommendations, increasing conversion by 8.9%.

    Technologies: React, Shopify Liquid, Sanity CMS, Algolia, Storybook

    Aug 2022 - Mar 2023

  • BA in Digital Media

    University of Leeds

    Achieved a 2:1 overall with a First in the final coding project.

    Jul 2022