Joseph Wynn

Engineering Team Lead and Principal Software Engineer

020 4133 6948 joseph@wildlyinaccurate.com github.com/wildlyinaccurate

Full stack engineering leader with 15+ years of experience building & scaling distributed systems and leading cross-functional teams. Skilled in real-time data processing pipelines, query abstraction layers, and high performance web platforms.

Experienced working at every layer of the web stack: database, backend, API, frontend, CDN/edge, and developer tooling. Proven track record of estimating, planning, and delivering complex software projects with teams of all sizes.

Dedicated to growing teams based on mutual trust, and lifting up everyone to achieve more together.

Overview

Languages: Rust, TypeScript/JavaScript, Python, SQL
Platforms: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Fastly Compute, Heroku, Render
Data stores: MariaDB/MySQL, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Amazon Redshift
Workflow: Git, Docker, Jenkins, CircleCI, GitHub
Team lead: 5–10 direct reports, 30+ indirect reports

Experience

Embrace | Principal Software Engineer

2026—present · Christchurch, Remote

Migrated the legacy RUM pipeline from Redshift to ClickHouse and enabled dual-running by adding SQL dialect support to the database abstraction layer.
Rewrote the JavaScript error tracking pipeline end-to-end, focusing on type safety and automated integration testing.
Assisted in bringing modern performance metrics into the Embrace web SDK.

SpeedCurve | Head of Engineering

2020—2026 · Christchurch, Remote

Worked directly with product and account teams to align technical direction with business goals, without compromising on technical debt work.
Oversaw interviewing, hiring, and onboarding of new team members. Used D&I best practices to ensure a wide range of applicants.
Continued working as an individual contributor. Focused on tasks that unblock the rest of the team, and framework-level code that helped streamline feature development.
Rebuilt ETL processes in Rust running on Fastly Edge Compute, improving performance and maintainability.

Experience (continued)

SpeedCurve | Principal Software Engineer

2017—2020 · Christchurch, Remote

Scaled the real user monitoring (RUM) pipeline to handle 150M events per day and allow real-time querying of 10TB of data.
Designed and built a database abstraction layer (DBAL) that simplifies querying & aggregating various data sources, enabling new dashboards & visualisations to be deployed easily.
Used code generation techniques including self-modifying code to build highly-optimised SQL for generating correlation charts.
Built a library of modular front-end components using techniques that I pioneered at the BBC.
Improved overall infrastructure reliability and reduced on-call events by 96%.

BBC News | Principal Software Engineer

2014—2017 · London

Migrated from on-premise to cloud infrastructure, developing a new component-as-a-service architecture serving 38M users per day.
Led the team responsible for building and deploying pages that were 50% faster.
Built a revamped CI pipeline that enabled teams to move from weekly deploys to several deploys per day.
Transitioned to a team lead role, focusing on building and supporting a self-sufficient team who worked efficiently together.

Various | Senior Software Developer

2007—2014 · Christchurch, London

Software development at various agencies. Built a tourism booking portal, a buy & sell platform, a real-time racing odds checker, and much more.
Built websites for some of the UK's largest magazine brands, using complex caching strategies to handle high traffic demands.
Built a video distribution platform, working alongside publishers and adtech.

Interests

Outside of my professional work I maintain several open source projects. I like to spend my free time surfing, rock climbing, running, and walking my dogs. Work-life balance is important to me, and I strive to ensure that everyone on my team can enjoy the same balance that I want for myself.

Writing

I mostly write on The Structured Thoughts & Wildly Inaccurate blogs, although some of my longer pieces have been turned into e-books. Here are a few my most popular pieces:

Let's Build a Virtual DOM Library (2023) – Demystifying VDOM frameworks by building one from scratch.
Becoming a Team Lead: A Survival Guide (2018) – Learnings and advice from my personal journey of developer to team lead. Originall given as a talk at O'Reilly Fluent 2018.
A Hacker's Guide to Git (2014) – A look at Git from the inside-out, explaining how simple building blocks come together to enable a powerful version control system.

Open Source

Below are a few of my open source projects. You can find the rest of them on GitHub.