JAMES WESTERBY
Summary
- Platform Engineer and systems thinker who specialises in bringing clarity to complex, ambiguous environments. Work from first principles to deconstruct messy processes, uncover hidden dependencies, and rebuild them into modular, scalable platforms that reduce friction and increase organisational velocity.
- Across both enterprise and startup environments, translate operational noise into reusable technical abstractions — designing cloud-native systems that are simple to evolve, independently deployable, and built for long-term adaptability. Focus on thoughtful automation, ensuring human effort is applied where judgement adds the most value.
- Architecturally minded, comfortable with ambiguity, and strongest where analysis meets execution — turning complexity into systems that are clear, extensible, and quietly powerful.
Overview
9
9
years of professional experience
4
4
years of post-secondary education
Work history
Director & Founder
Stumbled
2022.01 - 2026.02
- Founded and built Stumbled, a local SaaS commerce platform enabling independent shops to operate online, manage orders, and connect with local couriers.
- Transformed business-specific operational challenges into domain-agnostic platform primitives, abstracting business logic into reusable services consumable by any independent retailer onboarded to the system.
- Designed and implemented end-to-end services using Golang, React/React Native (TypeScript), and AWS cloud infrastructure.
- Created an order management and dispatch system that assigns deliveries/collections in real time with reactive choreography based architecture.
- Conducted direct field work gathering requirements from local shopkeepers and transforming their needs into intuitive customer-facing features.
- Managed strategic technology integrations with Stripe (for payments) and Zettle (for POS), ensuring seamless sync between online and in-store sales.
- Delivered a customer-focused experience with features like click-and-collect, order tracking, and shop discovery, aimed at revitalising local high streets.
- Orchestrated a cloud-based agentic development platform to increase velocity in feature-based development.
Lead Cloud Engineer
Barclays
2019.01 - 2026.02
- Architected and delivered an enterprise-grade, self-service telephony SaaS platform used by multiple internal product teams across the organisation.
- Designed a modular, abstraction-driven telephony platform enabling isolated, independently deployable components, reducing coupling and accelerating feature delivery.
- Established a cloud-native architecture on AWS focused on scalability, security, and repeatable infrastructure patterns (IaC-driven, modularised deployments).
- Built a simplified, scalable deployment framework enabling teams to adopt new AWS capabilities with minimal friction and low operational overhead.
- Worked cross-functionally across multiple feature teams to drive platform standardisation, ensuring consistency in observability, security controls, and release processes.
- Acted as technical liaison with AWS, aligning the platform roadmap with emerging cloud-native capabilities and ensuring strategic adoption of managed services.
- Mentored engineers and formalised onboarding processes, embedding best practices in secure coding, infrastructure automation, and production-grade observability.
- Partnered with Product Owners and stakeholders to translate business requirements into extensible platform primitives, enabling long-term adaptability over short-term feature builds.
Software Engineer
British Gymnastics
2017.01 - 2019.01
- Re-architected and rebuilt the membership onboarding system, enabling gymnasts to easily join local clubs via a simplified and user-friendly process.
- Refactored the legacy LAMP stack into a Java Spring Boot architecture, improving maintainability and resilience.
- Deployed the new solution using AWS Fargate, boosting scalability and performance while reducing operational overhead.
- Built and maintained CI/CD pipelines using Gitlab for rapid, iterative delivery while ensuring robust governance and control.
- The revamped system led to a significant reduction in customer service call volume, improving both customer satisfaction and internal efficiency.
- Automated local development environments hosting using Ansible and Docker for all developers machines.
Education
Bachelor of Science - Computer Science
Aberystwyth University
2013.01 - 2017.01
Skills
Cloud & Infrastructure Engineering
- AWS (multi-service architecture design)
- Infrastructure as Code (modularised, repeatable deployments)
- Serverless-first architecture patterns
- Event-driven systems design
- Distributed systems architecture
- High-availability & fault-tolerant design
- Modular deployment strategies
- Environment isolation & multi-tenant design
AWS Services
- Lambda
- API Gateway
- DynamoDB
- S3
- CloudFront
- Cognito
- Route 53
- SNS / SQS
- EventBridge
- Step Functions
- SES
- EC2
- CloudWatch
- Athena
- Glue
- Connect
- Lex
Platform & Backend Engineering
- Microservices & modular architecture
- Domain-driven design (DDD principles)
- RESTful API design
- Internal platform enablement
- Abstraction of business logic into reusable services
- Secure-by-design systems
- CI/CD design & automation
- CodeCommit & Git-based workflows
- Observability patterns (metrics, logging, tracing)
Programming
- Go (Golang)
- TypeScript
- React / React Native
- Java (Spring Boot)
- Event choreography patterns
DevOps & Containerisation
- Docker
- Automated testing pipelines
- Infrastructure automation
- Environment promotion strategies
- Release orchestration
Quality & Engineering Practices
- Test-Driven Development (TDD)
- Contract testing
- Behaviour-driven feature design
- Agile delivery
- Cross-team technical leadership
- Developer onboarding & enablement
Strategy & Product Thinking
- Platform product design
- Internal developer experience (DevEx) optimisation
- Lean product development
- Translating business requirements into technical abstractions
- Stakeholder engagement & technical facilitation
LANGUAGES
Go
Javascript/Typescript
Java
C
Python
SQL
PHP
Timeline
Director & Founder
Stumbled
2022.01 - 2026.02
Lead Cloud Engineer
Barclays
2019.01 - 2026.02
Software Engineer
British Gymnastics
2017.01 - 2019.01
Bachelor of Science - Computer Science
Aberystwyth University
2013.01 - 2017.01