Dan Purdy

Wonderbly is a London-based, direct-to-consumer publisher creating personalised gift books for children and adults—blending storytelling, design, and technology to make every customer feel like the hero of the story. Since launching in 2013, the company has grown into a global leader in personalised publishing, and in June 2025 it joined the Penguin Random House group (working closely with DK) while continuing to operate with its own culture and brand. Wonderbly also owns Historic Newspapers (historic-newspapers.com).

PrimaryBid aims to give everyone fair access to IPOs and public company fundraises, at the same time and price as institutional investors.

As a Senior Engineering Manager, I originally led two of our platform teams while also supporting the wider engineering team. I focused on making sure our teams were working effectively together while also working closely with our product team to ensure that the right work is being delivered. I contributed to the overall design of our system, direction of the platform and still managed to commit the odd bit of code too.

Urban is the UK's leading at home wellness platform, connecting wellness professionals and their customers via a bespoke web platform and apps.

As the Lead Frontend Engineer at Urban I was responsible for developing, overseeing and guiding the team on the development of Urban's 5 web-based platforms, which included everything from e-commerce to live streaming video platforms. The main frontend stack consisted of Node Express, React, NextJs, Typescript and MobX.

Alongside my role as Lead Frontend, I also acted as a team lead and technical lead for the B2B platform which enables companies to book, enrol and manage their employees access to bespoke in-office wellness treatments from their browser.

As B2B team lead, I worked across the Javascript based stack including their Node microservice backend while also officiating the usual Agile ceremonies, working closely with other stakeholders in the business to plan and architect solutions and features.

The team lead position involves working closely alongside our CTO and other senior team members helping to ensure that the whole product team is working towards a similar goal while directing and advising on how features should be implemented and how as a team we could improve efficiently and scalably.