Hi, I'm James.
I'm a professional software engineer and amateur urbanist from New Zealand.
I've lived and worked in Wellington and Amsterdam as a Senior Engineer and Technical Lead on modern fintech and consumer lending, distributed systems, and native mobile applications. I've been lucky to work with amazing people at Monzo, MessageBird, Consumer New Zealand, and ikeGPS.
I've recently moved back to New Zealand and I'm currently open for something new.
If you think I'd be a good fit for your project or company please reach out on Twitter or at jmccnz@gmail.com.
Projects and experience
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Building a new platform for Kiwis to make payments and get paid through Open Banking.
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Monzo is an app-based challenger bank in the UK, working to re-invent personal and business banking on a modern banking platform built in-house. I worked at Monzo in consumer borrowing as the Technical Lead for our loans and overdrafts products.
As Technical Lead I was focused on helping a cross-functional team of engineers and analysts scale our lending systems and customer-facing borrowing experience. I've worked on decisioning engines, interest charging and reconciliation, and led our team to be one of the first retail banks in the United Kindom to use Open Banking for income verification on borrowing applications.
We worked primarily in Golang, with a famously large micro-services architecture on top of Cassandra, Kafka, NSQ, GCS, BigQuery, and others.
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MessageBird builds products and APIs for companies to integrate their software with communication channels like SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and others.
I worked as the Technical Lead on a team focused on omni-channel conversation APIs, and we were one of the first services to offer a turn-key solution for our customers to configure WhatsApp's Business API in 2019. I primarily worked in Golang and React on top of Kubernetes and GCP services like PubSub, CloudSQL, and Spanner.
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Consumer.org.nz is New Zealand's largest consumer advocacy non-profit organisation. They also run Powerswitch (powerswitch.org.nz), helping Kiwis find and switch to the best electricity provider for them anywhere in the country.
In 2016 I worked as the technical lead on a small team to rebuild Powerswitch from the ground up to scale to a new and more complex electricity and gas pricing market. We built a completely new back-office system for maintaining plans and pricing structures, and a new mobile-first front-end and questionnaire that helped customers find what they could save. Most of this work was in Ruby, Node, and React, on top of Postgres and EC2.
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In 2015 ikeGPS was designing personal laser measurement devices and photogrammetry tools for smartphones. Our goal was to give anyone the ability to capture photos on their phone and pair them with distance data from our in-house designed laser attachment, to make it easier for tradespeople, DIYers, and so on to easily spec up their jobs.
I worked as a cross-platform engineer on a team building the Android and iOS applications for our Spike Smart Measure Pro apps (the latter a design for Stanley Tools). I was primarily focused on UI, camera integrations on Android, and a custom framework for reliable connections with our measurement devices over Bluetooth LE.