About

I’m James, a Staff Engineer based in Leeds, UK, with nearly 20 years of experience building software.

Today I work in trust and safety, building tools that help very large online platforms detect online risk, and using AI both to build those products and to oversee them. Over the years I’ve learned that the hard part is rarely the code: it’s the architecture, the trade-offs, and getting everyone pointed in the same direction.

I write about four things:

• Architecture and systems design: decisions, trade-offs and failure modes.
• Building with AI: products, agents, evaluation, cost and reliability in production.
• AI oversight: how to monitor, audit and trust AI systems.
• Staff-level leadership: stakeholder communication and making technical strategy land.

My examples come from trust and safety, security, real-world intelligence and tech for good.

You can find my code on GitHub.