I’m excited to announce that Ed Spencer has joined the Origin engineering team as a senior UI engineer. Ed is passionate about building the best front-end experiences for end-users. He brings tons of expertise in React and Node JS which are technologies we use extensively at Origin to build our DeFi and NFT products.
Ed is also a strong advocate for continuously improving development velocity by building well-architected, easy to maintain, and carefully tested applications. As a demonstration of that, within a week of joining our team, he built an automated UI test suite (leveraging Playwright.dev) that he integrated with our continuous integration tools to ensure there are no UI regressions when we deploy new code to the NFT launchpad platform. Yay!
Ed grew up in a small village in rural England and received a computer science degree from the University of Warwick where he met his lifelong friend and Origin colleague Nick Poulden.
Right out of college, the pair of friends demonstrated their entrepreneurial spirit by starting a successful technology business in the UK that they ran for 5 years before selling it. For the anecdote, back then they were early adopters of single page JavaScript technologies, which is now at the core of most modern web applications.
Ed then moved to the US where he became an architect at Sencha, an iconic startup in Palo Alto, at the heart of Silicon Valley. There he contributed to Ext JS and Sencha Touch, one of the very first cross-platform UI frameworks on the market. He continued his career by spending 3 years at C3 AI (then a startup and now a prominent publicly-traded company) building big data applications for the smart grid. Most lately, Ed was an engineering manager at Palo Alto Networks where he led a team building products for security researchers.
At Origin, we are always looking for world-class talent. When Nick mentioned Ed was looking for a change, we jumped on the opportunity to reach out to tell him about the technical challenges we solve every day, but also about how our hiring process differs very much compared to most hi-tech companies. Instead of doing technical interviews, we ask candidates to demonstrate their abilities by working on a few concrete projects with our team. Ed took on the challenge. To no one’s surprise, we were impressed by how fast he got up to speed and was able to contribute to our NFT Launchpad codebase. We got the clear signals we look for when hiring engineers and quickly made an offer to Ed to join our team full-time. To our delight he accepted!
Outside of work, Ed loves playing soccer ⚽. He is a big fan of Manchester United and was thrilled at the recent news that Cristiano Ronaldo was moving back to the Red Devils. Ed also enjoys learning about history and especially medieval history. He has been slowly but steadily learning French and Portuguese and loves etymology. He adopted a giant Maine Coon cat called Gandalf who regularly participates in our engineering video calls and has a talent for knocking down expensive large hi-def monitors on Ed’s desk.
Please join me in welcoming Ed to the Origin engineering team!
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