James Hinshelwood
Software Engineer at Jane Street
Cambridge, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Hinshelwood is a Software Engineer with nine years’ experience building backend and platform systems, currently at Jane Street after leading platform engineering at Zilliqa. He combines production-grade DevOps with low-level blockchain expertise—having implemented EVM precompiled elliptic curve contracts and corrected ZIL transaction address logic in the high-throughput Zilliqa project. Prior roles at BigPay saw him progress from developer to Head of Development and Engineering Lead, delivering payments and banking platform features at scale. A Cambridge Computer Science graduate based in Cambridge, England, he brings a practitioner’s eye for build pipeline efficiency and deployment simplification. Colleagues describe him as a pragmatic engineer who moves between deep protocol work and practical operational improvements. An attention to detail in persistence and Docker optimizations often surfaces as small changes that materially speed up builds and deployments.
9 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts - BA Computer Science, Bachelor of Arts - BA Computer Science at University of Cambridge
Stackoverflow
23reputation
1kreached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (16)
evm10
rust10
virtual-machine10
blockchain10
dockers9
devops9
solidity9
smart-contracts9
docker9
kubernetes8
kubernetes-pods8
githubaction-workflow7
aws7
python7
github-ci7
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
Zilliqa/Zilliqa
Oct 2022 - Jan 2023
Zilliqa is the world's first high-throughput public blockchain platform - designed to scale to thousands of transactions per second.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:3 releases, 148 reviews, 22 commits in 3 months
Contributions summary:James implemented precompiled contracts for elliptic curve operations within the EVM, including `ecAdd`, `ecMul`, and `ecPairing`. They also contributed to the Zilliqa contract address calculation by correcting the nonce usage for ZIL-style transactions. Furthermore, the user worked on improving the build process by moving linting earlier in the build pipeline, and simplifying and streamlining the Dockerfiles for more efficient builds. They have also made changes to the persistence scripts and deployment configuration files.
blockchain-platformzilliqablockchainscalehigh-throughput
Zilliqa/zq2
Sep 2023 - Apr 2025
Zilliqa 2.0 code base
Contributions:4 releases, 1710 reviews, 1204 PRs in 1 year 7 months
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