James Guthrie
Staff Software Engineer at Timescale
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Guthrie is a Staff Software Engineer based in Zurich with 13 years of experience building high-performance backend systems and Postgres extensions in Rust. At Timescale he has driven Promscale and TimescaleDB improvements—implementing database features, compression reliability, and Rust-based Postgres extension work that bridge observability and time-series storage. His open-source contributions span pgrx (making PostgreSQL+Rust integration smoother), Promscale release plumbing, and mypy type-stub enhancements, reflecting a pragmatic focus on tooling, build reliability, and developer ergonomics. He has moved between hands-on engineering and technical leadership (former CTO at True Wealth), combining systems-level thinking with product delivery. Fluent in low-level database internals and practical CLI/CI concerns, he often fixes cross-platform build quirks and subtle type/compatibility edge cases that others miss. Trained at ETH Zürich, he brings academic rigor to production-grade systems engineering.
13 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Master's Degree Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Master's Degree Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at ETH Zürich
English, German
Github Skills (37)
timeseries-database10
static-typing10
typesc10
type-inference10
cargo10
postgresql10
type-check10
python10
mypy10
dynamic-typing10
databases10
typescript10
implicit-typing10
type-system10
typehinting10
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
timescale/promscale
Nov 2021 - Dec 2022
[DEPRECATED] Promscale is a unified metric and trace observability backend for Prometheus, Jaeger and OpenTelemetry built on PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:305 reviews, 153 commits, 198 PRs in 1 year
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to Promscale's backend infrastructure and API by addressing deprecated flags, removing legacy functionalities, and enhancing feature flags. Their work involved adding and modifying command-line interface (CLI) flags related to experimental features like tracing. They also addressed issues related to deprecated environment variables and prepared the release and development cycles for the project.
promqlobservabilitypromscalegrafanaprometheus
pgcentralfoundation/pgrx
Nov 2021 - Sep 2022
Build Postgres Extensions with Rust!
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:14 reviews, 12 commits, 17 PRs in 10 months
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to the `pgrx` repository, which is a Rust-based library for building PostgreSQL extensions. Their work included adding include files, addressing build issues related to macOS, and integrating versioning information from `Cargo.toml`. They also implemented type mappings to facilitate interaction with `TimestampTz` and addressed issues related to aggregate functions and SQL generation. Furthermore, the user made several fixes related to copying files during installation and incorporated experimental features like versioned shared libraries.
postgresql-databasepostgresql-extensionrustrustlangextensions
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.