James Henderson
XTDB Head Of Engineering at Grid Dynamics
Braintree, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Henderson is a pragmatic engineering leader with 12 years of experience building and scaling backend systems, currently serving as Head of Engineering for XTDB at Grid Dynamics and JUXT. A first-class MEng graduate from Imperial College London, he blends hands-on Clojure and Java expertise with people leadership, having moved from developer to technical lead and head of technology roles across startups and finance. He’s an active open-source contributor to high-profile projects such as Apache Arrow, improving Java back-end performance and core data structures—an indicator of his focus on efficient data processing. Known for cutting batch runtimes by orders of magnitude early in his career, he combines performance-first engineering with pragmatic management to deliver reliable distributed data systems.
12 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
MEng (First Class Honours), Computing, MEng (First Class Honours), Computing at Imperial College LondonKing Edward VI Grammar School, Chelmsford, Essex
French
Stackoverflow
11reputation
2kreached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (13)
apache-arrow10
data-structures10
javas10
data-structure10
java10
testing9
debugging9
github8
parquet7
locking6
indexing6
sql6
postgresql6
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
apache/arrow
Apr 2021 - Nov 2024
Apache Arrow is the universal columnar format and multi-language toolbox for fast data interchange and in-memory analytics
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 reviews, 7 PRs, 26 comments in 3 years 7 months
Contributions summary:James Henderson primarily contributed to the Java backend of the Apache Arrow project. His work includes fixing bugs, adding functionality like the `toString` method for debugging, and improving code efficiency, such as optimizing `ListVector.setNull`. He also made minor documentation improvements and refactored core classes related to data structures like `DenseUnionVector` and `FixedSizeListVector`.
apache-arrowarrowparquet
jarohen/xtdb
Nov 2019 - Jul 2026
Bitemporal and dynamic relational database for SQL and Datalog. Developed by @juxt
Contributions:1 release, 6531 pushes, 1320 branches in 6 years 9 months
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