James Elderfield
Lead Game Programmer at Next Games, A Netflix Game Studio
Helsinki, Finland
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames Elderfield is a Lead Game Programmer based in Helsinki with 11 years of engineering experience that spans game development, product engineering, DevOps and computational biology. He combines a PhD in Mathematical and Computational Biology from Cambridge with hands-on systems design—building product features, CI/CD pipelines and test automation across startups and scaleups. James has led and grown engineering teams as CTO/Tech Lead, restructured organisations for domain-focused delivery, and driven migrations such as JS→TypeScript and monorepo architectures. Comfortable as both an individual contributor and manager, he routinely ships end-to-end products from user research to production. Unusually for a senior engineer, his background in academic modelling informs pragmatic approaches to complex system design and tooling. Currently shaping games at Next Games after recent product work in clinical and data tooling, he blends scientific thinking with product-first software craft.
11 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Mathematical and Computational Biology, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Mathematical and Computational Biology at University of Cambridge
Finnish, German, Spanish
Stackoverflow
2,429reputation
169kreached
59answers
13questions
Github Skills (27)
apps-script9
cli8
javascript7
firebase6
ruby-on-rails6
google-cloud-firestore6
typescript6
python6
git-commit6
pandas6
qt6
r6
command-line5
latex5
ruby5
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
verifa/gitops-demo
Dec 2019 - Jan 2020
A demo showcasing GitOps, whereby the initial state for Conway's Game of Life can be made as a git commit, evaluated in CI and auto-deployed to a Kubernetes cluster running on GKE. The Infrastructure behind this is available at: https://github.com/verifa/gitops-demo-infra
Contributions:8 commits, 14 PRs, 143 pushes in 1 month
gitopskubernetes-cluster
elderfd/GeneDrop
Nov 2014 - Jun 2019
Contributions:3 releases, 133 commits, 24 pushes in 4 years 8 months
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