James Davies
Senior Software Engineer
📧 jamesmikedavies@gmail.com | GitHub | LinkedIn
Profile
Senior Software Engineer with five years' experience building and operating high-traffic backend systems at the Financial Times, and a consistent track record of stepping into technical and people leadership. Comfortable as a hands-on Tech Lead. Shaping technical direction on mission-critical services serving millions of users daily, while coaching engineers, leading delivery, and partnering with stakeholders across the organisation.
As a Deaf engineer, I bring a lived perspective on inclusive engineering practice and actively cultivate that culture in the teams I lead. I'm also involved with Mary Hare School for the Deaf, supporting students as they think about careers in tech and the working world.
Experience
Financial Times — Senior Engineer
Engineering Insights · Nov 2025 – present
Origami · Dec 2023 – Nov 2025 — Senior Engineer / Tech Lead
Internal Products · Mar 2021 – Dec 2023 — Tech Lead, Developer Automation; Engineer, Martech
Leadership & delivery
- Led the Origami workstream across three platinum-tier platform services (Image, Build, Navigation) used by every engineering team at the FT. Set technical direction, drove roadmap alignment, and held the line on operational stability.
- Manage and mentor two engineers (senior and mid-level), running regular 1:1s, setting objectives aligned to team and org goals, and supporting career progression.
- Lead sprint planning, refinements, and retrospectives; partner with leadership on quarterly OKRs and represent the team in cross-organisational technical forums.
- As Tech Lead for Developer Automation, delivered a suite of internal tools (notifications, repo scanning, secrets migration, observability).
Technical impact
- Led the ground-up redesign of the FT's Image Service (a platform handling millions of daily requests for ft.com web and mobile) from v2 to v3, introducing a scheme-based routing architecture that materially improved extensibility and reduced the cost of adding new image sources.
- Delivered a 62% average performance improvement on high-traffic image processing through internal caching, and achieved a 99.5% cache hit rate by migrating delivery to Cloudflare and optimising the image variant strategy.
- Led migration of three platform services (Image, Navigation, Build) from Heroku to AWS (ECS/Fargate, Lambda), improving scalability, cost efficiency, and operational control.
- Drove Image Service v3 to platinum-tier status (multi-region, enhanced resilience) and continue to deliver cost and performance optimisation.
Capgemini Applied Innovation Exchange — Emerging Technology Engineer
Jul 2019 – Mar 2021
Built rapid prototypes (React, React Native, Node.js) for global enterprise clients in a startup-style innovation lab. Contributed to CornerShop, a live retail proof-of-concept in London blending digital innovation with in-store experiences.
Technical skills
Languages & runtime: Node.js, TypeScript, JavaScript, React
Cloud & infrastructure: AWS (ECS/Fargate, Lambda), Cloudflare, Docker, Heroku
Data: MongoDB, PostgreSQL, schema design and query optimisation
Delivery & observability: GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Grafana, Splunk, automated testing pipelines
Ways of working: Agile delivery, OKRs, sprint facilitation, 1:1s and career development, technical writing
Education
Makers Academy — Full Stack Coding Bootcamp (Fellowship student), 2019
Chichester College — HND Computing (Software Development), 2008–2010