James Blackburn
CTO, Alpha Platform
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Blackburn is a seasoned technology leader and CTO with 17 years of experience building low-latency trading platforms and large-scale data infrastructure from his base in London. Currently leading the Alpha Platform at Man Group and heading Data Engineering and Linux Infrastructure for Man AHL, he blends hands-on systems engineering with strategic platform leadership. His background spans embedded C++ and tooling at Broadcom to high-performance Python/DB work on time-series datastores like the open-source Arctic project, where he improved stability, timezone handling, and usability. James is comfortable diving into both kernel-level performance and cloud-native data pipelines, and he has a track record of turning complex, latency-sensitive requirements into maintainable production systems. A Cambridge Computer Science graduate, he pairs deep technical craft with a pragmatic focus on operational resilience and developer productivity. An understated strength is his ability to translate low-level optimizations into measurable business performance in quantitative trading environments.
17 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
BA Computer Science, BA Computer Science at University of Cambridge
Stackoverflow
4,491reputation
427kreached
28answers
3questions
ide
top-1%
refresh
top-5%
eclipse
top-1%
pydev
top-1%
command-line
top-5%
eclipse-plugin
top-5%
Github Skills (21)
admin10
python10
pydev10
pandas10
ide10
database-administration10
mongodb-database10
eclipse10
mongodb10
eclipse-plugin9
databases9
refresh9
command-line9
database9
maven6
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
man-group/arctic
May 2015 - Oct 2019
High performance datastore for time series and tick data
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 5 reviews, 144 commits in 4 years 5 months
Contributions summary:James primarily focused on improving the stability and maintainability of the `arctic` datastore. Their contributions involved fixing deprecation warnings, correcting timezone-related issues within tests, and enhancing the functionality of the `arctic_create_user` script. Furthermore, the user added a demo script to the repository, showcasing the usage of Arctic for storing and retrieving time-series data, and also implemented crucial code changes to manage and address potential issues within the data storage process.
pythonticktickstoretick-dataarctic
man-group/Pydev
Feb 2012 - Oct 2017
Python IDE for Eclipse
Contributions:28 commits, 1 push, 6 branches in 5 years 9 months
pythonideeclipsejavapython-ide
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