Jess Telford
Staff Engineer at Dovetail
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJess Telford is a Staff Engineer and technical leader based in Sydney with 14 years of experience building large-scale front-end architectures, developer tooling, and design systems. Currently at Dovetail after leading platform and Polaris work at Shopify, Jess has owned critical JavaScript build and end-to-end testing infrastructure that multiplied engineers’ ability to ship stable merchant admin code. A serial builder and former co‑founder of Cete, they bridge product thinking and engineering execution—growing teams, shipping reusable component systems at Domain, and mentoring through teaching roles. Jess is an active open-source contributor with notable work in Shopify’s Polaris and Next.js, skilled at migrating complex SASS codebases and adding practical examples that improve framework adoption. Known for turning messy front-end ecosystems into maintainable platforms, they combine hands-on coding with cross-team collaboration to deliver pragmatic, scalable solutions.
14 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
B.C.S (Games Technology) Advanced Mathematics Game Devlopment Programming (C++ Java) Misc IT classes, B.C.S (Games Technology) Advanced Mathematics Game Devlopment Programming (C++ Java) Misc IT classes at Charles Sturt University
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (45)
javascript10
expressjs10
sass10
authentication10
postcss10
user-authentication10
typescript10
nextjs10
system-design10
carbon-design-system10
wpgraphql10
component-library10
component-kit10
sys10
wordpress-graphql10
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
keystonejs/keystone
May 2018 - Jul 2021
The superpowered headless CMS for Node.js — built with GraphQL and React
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:18 reviews, 743 commits, 519 PRs in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Jess primarily contributed to the backend functionality of the Keystone.js headless CMS project, focusing on features related to authentication using Twitter OAuth. Their work involved implementing the Twitter OAuth dance by adding Passport.js strategy and associated server routes. The user also updated existing session management code and made improvements to the update mutation for more reliable functionality.
cmscms-frameworkreactnode-jsnodejs
Shopify/polaris
Oct 2022 - Jan 2023
Shopify’s design system to help us work together to build a great experience for all of our merchants.
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:298 reviews, 94 commits, 191 PRs in 3 months
Contributions summary:Jess primarily worked on the Shopify Polaris design system, focusing on migrating and refactoring existing SASS code. Their contributions include the creation of a Sass migrator method to wrap common functionality and the shim of stylelint features. They implemented a new migration for transitioning between SASS and Polaris tokens and handled the partial fix cases within the migration process.
shopifymerchantsreactvscode-extensiongreat
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