Stuart Sillitoe

Bitsler/Front-End Development Lead

iGaming · crypto casino & sportsbook · Full-time contract (B2B)

• Lead six engineers and two designers owning the player-facing crypto and fiat casino and sportsbook - hiring (with code tests I wrote), mentoring, promotions, code review, and roadmap with the owners.
• Rebuilt the platform from Vue 2 to Vue 3 with server-side rendering (TypeScript, Node, AWS, Cloudflare) with zero downtime, alongside a redesign of the UI and player flows, compressed real-time websocket feeds, and automated translation - Lighthouse rose from the 40s to the 80s-90s, followed by a 20% rise in first-time deposits and longer sessions.
• Designed and built the backoffice and CMS end to end - finance, CRM, player management, analytics, and content for every casino page with live previews - migrated with a strangler-fig approach; around 30 staff use it daily, and reports that took minutes now return in seconds.
• On my own initiative, built the Super Pixel Series of Pixi.js casino games - within weeks two were among the five most-played of our 24 in-house games - and Thumbnail Manager, which took two designers from around 20 thumbnails a day to hundreds, for 20,000 games.
• Brought AI into the team's daily work - shared agent rules and skills, Jira and Git integration, and AI review ahead of senior review - speeding up tickets; plus AI analysis of player, churn, and finance data.

FanDuel · Flutter/Full-Stack Engineer, FanDuel Explore

iGaming · US sportsbook & casino

• One of a six-person greenfield team (with the director and UX lead) that took FanDuel Explore - a personalised feed of content and suggested bets inside the flagship app, in front of millions of players - from concept to a staged rollout; sessions grew longer, players bet more often on suggested bets, and new players rose by roughly 10% in the first months.
• Wrote APIs and the React front end, integrated it into the native iOS and Android apps with React Native, and wired in the business's state-by-state compliance services.
• Built its tooling: per-player feed curation from attributes and weighted results, plus usage dashboards.

PokerStars · Flutter/Full-Stack & UX Engineer

iGaming · casino & sports platforms

• Brought in for my Backbone.js experience to fix a legacy codebase, then took on the whole front end of the main PokerStars casino app, web and mobile, including the sportsbook interface.
• Built the SkyBet and FOX Bet front ends from the same UI, working closely with UX and design on flows before anything was drawn; plus an internal CMS, APIs, and data feeds in JavaScript, Node, and React.
• Promoted with four colleagues into a new greenfield product team at FanDuel.

Pro:Direct Sport/Full-Stack Developer & Team Lead

E-commerce · sports retail

• Directed development of in-house software, dashboards, web apps, checkout UI, and APIs in C#, .NET Core, and Vue.js for 10+ sport-specific sites in multiple languages, including brand microsites for Nike, Adidas, Puma, and New Balance.
• Created List Builder, letting staff curate product pages from live stock and attributes while it generated and cached the SQL - replacing a manual process that had taken 16 staff with about one per category, saving hundreds of hours a week.
• Replaced disconnected legacy Visual Basic tools with integrated C#/.NET APIs, front ends, and database schemas, then co-led the year-long move of thousands of pages onto Sitecore.
• Led up to 12 developers within a 20+ strong front-end team, and hired permanent and contract developers with technical tests I wrote.

Independent/Contractor & Freelance Developer

• Wrote the PHP address-lookup API for PostcodeAnywhere (since acquired by Loqate).
• Built VITL's platform end to end - website, CMS, database, APIs, and subscriptions and payments - and pre-release promo apps for Universal Pictures' Ride Along and Lone Survivor.
• Designed and built PlainSailing.com - still their only site, on my original build, through four industry awards including Best Yacht Charter Broker - Europe; plus Dartmoor National Park and TelecomTV.

Pulse8 Internet/Senior Developer, then Head Developer

Web hosting & ISP

• Built the company's hosting platform in Ruby, back end and customer front end - domain and hosting purchase, payment, and self-service management - for hundreds of UK and European customers.
• Wrote the custom CMS framework behind hundreds of client sites, including dozens of estate agents with Rightmove feeds, plus payments and subscriptions (SecureTrading and others).
• Built and racked the servers in local data centres and ran web, DNS, mail, and databases on Linux - thousands of mailboxes - plus dashboards for the broadband team.
• Joined as a senior developer and became head of development, hiring and mentoring a team of five as the company grew to twelve.