The Journey

At Five Below, I played a pivotal role as a Lead Senior Frontend Engineer, where I was responsible for designing and optimizing the front-end experience for a large-scale e-commerce platform. The team and I tackled the challenge of creating a seamless, responsive, and scalable UI while integrating modern frameworks like React to enhance performance and usability. We aimed to deliver a consistent, fast, and intuitive user experience across both desktop and mobile platforms. One of the most rewarding aspects of the role was collaborating with cross-functional teams—including designers, product managers, and backend engineers—to ensure that our solutions aligned with business goals while meeting customer expectations. Additionally, we adopted Agile and Scrum methodologies to break down complex tasks, allowing us to iterate rapidly while maintaining code quality and performance standards.

One of our biggest challenges at Five Below was ensuring performance and stability during high-traffic events, like seasonal sales and product launches. To address this, we prioritized performance optimization and load testing, identifying and resolving bottlenecks to improve page load times and responsiveness. Implementing dynamic UI components and conducting thorough code reviews helped maintain a robust and scalable architecture. We also focused on enhancing accessibility and cross-browser compatibility, ensuring that users diverse environments could easily navigate the site. The successful re-platforming effort not only improved the website's performance and scalability but also boosted customer satisfaction and engagement. This experience honed my ability to collaborate effectively, solve technical challenges, and deliver impactful solutions in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.