James Blackwell

Portfolio

python - 8 years of experience. Favourite libraries / tools: dagster, polars, fastAPI, uv.
SQL - 9 years of experience. Favourite databases: duckdb, bigquery.
Cloud platforms - 5 years of experience. Have worked on GCP, Azure and AWS. Favourite services: bigquery, google cloud run, secret manager.
git - 9 years of experience. lazygit fan.
CI/CD - 3 years of experience including docker and github actions.

Data Engineer (2023-2024); Senior Data Engineer (2024-present)

Designed, developed and maintain/iterate on a data orchestration platform in dagster - I have also contributed to the open-source project and developed two open-source plugins dagster-db and dagster-ibis.
- Including bespoke and generic testing and validation of data assets; extensive metadata collection to enable improved data cataloguing; improving team best practices; and onboarding team members onto the dagster platform and implementing feedback to improve developer experience.
Project managing the migration from our legacy codebase to the dagster platform including planning, managing team resource and reviewing PRs.
Suggested, designed and developed an API for our public datasets including the development, databases, deployment, CICD, monitoring (performance and errors).
Line managing employees and supporting their projects in front-end development and AI.
Contributing towards organisation AI strategy and am running an organisation-wide pilot program of AI tooling.

Aiimi - Data Consultant (2019-2021); Senior Data Engineer (2021-2023)
- Migrated ETL pipelines from the old on-premise data warehouse to a bespoke databricks-based cloud platform. Developed a testing framework to improve data quality that became part of the platform and widely adopted.
- Lead initiative and developed methodology to estimate internal carbon emissions from Azure usage.
- Other projects include: COVID workorce management; Utility demand modelling; asset condition modelling and document classification.
- Other roles include: ‘data community’ leader; career shift mentor; apprentice mentor.
Havas Media Group - Junior Data Scientist (2018-2019)
- Projects include: Web-scraping analytics; automating econometric modelling; developed an R-Shiny app to assist econometric modelling.