Shaun Donnelly

About

I’m an experienced Swift, React Native and front-end web developer who’s looking for new challenges. I’m also experienced in people management, which has given me experience leading teams, having difficult conversations, and finding pragmatic solutions to tricky, ambiguous problems.

Outside of work I make iOS apps, practising what I preach with best-in-class, accessible products that delight tens of thousands of people every day. It’s helped me develop a range of additional skills that make me more effective in my day job, like marketing, design, product management, customer support, and business development. In particular, my app Personal Best maintains over 50,000 monthly active users and is frequently featured by Apple.

I’m comfortable wearing many hats and contributing to the business wherever I can have a positive impact, no matter where that is in the stack. At your company I’ll advocate for simple solutions, biasing for action, and empowering engineers to grow and become more autonomous.

Experience

📦  Packfleet

Packfleet was a green delivery startup. I led a complete rewrite of the app their drivers used, transforming it from a Swift-based codebase to React Native.

The project was a big success, allowing us to ship the app on both Android and iOS with zero downtime, maintaining a high-quality UX, while adding new capabilities like instant over-the-air updates and improved observability.

I left Packfleet in March 2025 when they were taken over by DHL.

🛩  Duffel

Initially I led Duffel’s front-end team as an engineering manager. Under my leadership we successfully doubled in size, delivering lots of new products and improvements to existing ones. I also identified several areas of growing technical debt and helped to instil a culture of constantly addressing and reducing it.

As part of the engineering leadership team I also drove lots of other initiatives, like our levelling and career progression frameworks.

In October 2022 I decided to move out of management, and switched to leading engineers in an informal capacity, leading from the front by building Duffel Links, a brand-new white label product, which was delivered in record time.

After Duffel I took a career break to focus on growing my iOS apps.

✈️  Skyscanner

I led Backpack, Skyscanner’s design system. My time was roughly 50% hands-on coding 50% people management and strategy.

I was heavily involved in Skyscanner’s rebrand, a challenging year-long project affecting dozens of teams across the company. I also drove mobile support in the design system, quadrupling the number of platforms we supported while maintaining a lean, focused team.

📈  Ensighten

I worked on a range of projects across Ensighten’s product line. My most notable work was developing Ensighten’s design system, which honed their disparate, confusing UIs into a single coherent experience that felt like one family of products.

🖥️  ICUK

This was my first job after university, where I was able to try my hand at many different technologies across ICUK’s entire stack, before deciding to specialise on front-end for my subsequent roles.

Education

🎓  University of Manchester

BSc (Hons) Computer Science with Business and Management (2:1)