Founder & CD at White Bear 🐻‍❄️ | Top 22 Female Founder 2022 ⚡️| Small Agency of the year 2022 🥇| CP Top 5 Agencies in UK ✏️ | Speaker and Host 🎤 | 16x Award winner 2022 🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆

Kelly Mackenzie is a two-time founder, creative director, and unapologetic brand obsessive. She leads White Bear, the award-winning creative agency with studios in London, Dublin, and South America, recognised as Agency of the Year 2022 and winner of multiple DBA, Transform, Pent, Mobius, IDI, Creativepool, and Red Dot awards for work with brands like Red Bull, Netflix, Bold Bean, Tom Parker Creamery, and The Kerry Group.

She’s also the founder of People Like Me – a growing community for women in marketing to make real, meaningful connections in person, cutting through the algorithm and digital noise to create friendships, share challenges, and help each other shine.

Named one of Startup Magazine’s Top 22 Women of 2022 and a Creativepool Leader of 2023, Kelly is passionate about design thinking, education, and championing women in leadership. She has lectured at IADT and NUA, served on the board of The Big Idea, and mentored start-ups with Bethnal Green Ventures, Enterprise Nation, and SeedLegals.

Her philosophy? Build unforgettable brands, disrupt industries, and make people feel something – and have the craic while doing it.

Learn more at 
http://www.whitebearstudio.com
http://www.peoplelikeme.io


Subscribe to our newsletter at: https://mailchi.mp/whitebearstudio/newsletter
Or contact me directly at kelly@whitebearstudio.com

Kelly Mackenzie 🐻‍❄️

Menuez International

Delivered crucial features and handled key maintenance tasks.

• Created a new flagship feature, using OpenAI and other LLM providers to infer data from photographs and pre-fill forms, saving customers significant time;
• Built deep integration with a newly selected, third-party print editor using modern JavaScript via Stimulus;
• Designed and implemented new cloud deployment strategies with Docker, Kamal, Terraform, and GitLab CI/CD;
• Upgraded and replaced components of the existing platform, patching vulnerable software and increasing overall reliability.

Senior Software Engineer

Nedap Healthcare

Maintained and improved a large set of Ruby libraries in use across many independent (micro-)services, melding them into a cohesive framework as part of the new application platform, whilst providing support and upgrade paths for other teams.

• Maintained a number of internal dependencies which together made up the legacy Ruby / Rails application platform;
• Implemented reusable, shared CI/CD components, resulting in greater consistency and a more "plug-and-play" developer experience across teams;
• Automated dependency monitoring, providing actionable insights over hundreds of projects.

Initforthe

Engineered full-stack apps for small to medium businesses with Ruby on Railsand Hotwire; worked very closely with clients to extract requirements and implement high impact features.

• Used PostGIS, Google Maps and JavaScript with Stimulus to build highly interactive maps used for GPS queries;
• Optimised slow and unreliable CI/CD pipelines, using paralellism to decrease test run-time by up to 95%, and leading to substantial productivity gains and lower time to delivery across the team;
• Took over administration of several EOL Windows Server machines, writing Powershell scripts for legacy data consumption and synchronization over APIs.

PDM Automotive

Ruby developer for a leading VC-funded, data-heavy app in the automotive space.

• Sustained a complex Sinatra/Padrino application;
• Improved a Shopify app with Elasticsearch and React;
• Advised on separation of a monolith into a microservices architecture.

LICO Innovations

I returned to Lico Innovations during this period; please see the previous listing below.

Software Developer

OnTheGoSystems

Worked on WPML, one of the largest premium WordPress plugins. Primary focus was on the Rails backend and communication with other services in the SOA.

Plug in Useful

Built SaaS applications in Ruby on Rails & React for the Shopify e-commerce platform.

• Spearheaded workflow improvements, DevOps, and communication, resulting in quicker feature delivery and a sense of teamwork;
• Took ownership of code and infrastructure following a restructure, whilst keeping systems running and customers happy;
• Worked closely with sales and customer service to prioritise and resolve concrete, customer-facing issues.

Lead Engineer

Lico Innovations

Architected web applications of various sizes under demanding time constraints.

• Developed a large enterprise SaaS application for global corporations in the catering industry, pivoting for survival early in the COVID-19 pandemic;
• Leveraged Artificial Intelligence to generate rich metadata for a Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool used by film festivals, agencies, and educational institutions;
• Implemented custom in-house tooling with Elixir to increase engineer productivity and reduce friction around a new, Docker-based development environment.

Codebath

Partnered with a designer to build high-quality, UX-focused websites for small businesses.

Full-stack Developer

Keezze

Designed and developed websites from specifications with an in-house PHP CMS.

Full-Stack Developer

⚒️ Experienced Ruby /  Rails Engineer — 🇬🇧 English Native  — 🙋‍♂️ Available — 👇 Pitch

With fifteen years in the industry, I've honed my broad skill set and product-minded approach to deliver high-quality, user-focused software. I ask the necessary questions to ensure that time is spent delivering impactful features that your customers need. Hire me to launch your new MVP, scale up your suffering legacy app, or anything in between.

I've worked with diverse teams across companies both large and small, gaining the confidence and expertise to tackle a wide range of challenges — from rapidly building new products in a tiny startup to iterating on planet-scale micro-services within a multi-national organisation.

I probably won't be able to patent a new algorithm to reduce load times by 0.05% across the board. But I will be able to help you find and remediate bottlenecks that are demonstrably causing your customers to bounce.

I won't disappear into a cave for two weeks with a feature specification and come back with a perfect implementation. I'd rather iterate and communicate; in two weeks the entire feature may have been scrapped in favour of a different value-add. Let's build the right things well, rather than the wrong things perfectly.

And I won't sit idly by if the team is clearly unhappy and underperforming. Whether I need to take the reins myself or inform others, everyone deserves to work in a positive environment, conducive to their happiness. Anything less produces bad software.

So that's roughly what I do.  If you really haven't had enough of me, check out my website — https://schembri.me

Have a nice day!

taplio

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Kelly Mackenzie 🐻‍❄️

Jamie Schembri

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