James Kay
Senior Software Engineer at entailor
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Kay is a research-focused software engineer and co-founder with 16 years of experience designing distributed, concurrent, and systems software. Based in London, he brings deep hands-on expertise in Rust, C++, and Haskell, and has applied that knowledge across roles from compiler research at Hadean to senior engineering on Linera’s protocol and infrastructure. As CTO & Co-Founder of entailor he combines product-facing leadership with low-level engineering, and his open-source work includes improving build and WASM support for the Linera protocol and bespoke QMK keyboard firmware customizations. He has an MComp from the University of Bath and a taste for “weird interfaces,” evidenced by projects that bridge analogue ideas and balanced ternary curiosities. Quietly obsessed with developer tooling and reproducible environments, he often surfaces clean, pragmatic solutions to complex concurrency and deployment challenges.
16 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Sussex Downs CollegeMComp Computer Science (hons) Computer Science, MComp Computer Science (hons) Computer Science at University of Bath
English, Japanese, Spanish, French, lojban, Esperanto
Github Skills (28)
keyboard-input10
c-language10
nix10
qmk-firmware10
firmware10
qmk10
c1110
keyboard10
c1710
keyboard-layout10
blazor-webassembly10
rust10
webassembly10
cprogramming-language10
custom-keyboard9
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
linera-io/linera-protocol
Oct 2023 - Apr 2025
Main repository for the Linera protocol
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:460 reviews, 258 PRs, 112 pushes in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:James focused on improving the Linera protocol's development environment and infrastructure. Their contributions include updating the Nix flake and rustup toolchain to a newer format, which included adding WASM support. They also added a Nix development environment for the project. Furthermore, the user worked on simplifying and unifying error handling in a helper script. They also upgraded dependencies to the latest compatible versions.
blockchainrustwasm
qmk/qmk_firmware
Apr 2016 - Mar 2018
Open-source keyboard firmware for Atmel AVR and Arm USB families
Role in this project:Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:7 commits, 4 PRs, 2 comments in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:James primarily contributes to keymap customization within the QMK firmware, modifying and integrating layouts for various keyboard configurations. They focused on adapting the firmware to support specific user needs, including integrating a steno layout (Plover), and adding custom media key mappings. Their changes include modifications to keymap layers and functionality for more ergonomic and functional user experience.
rp2040firmwareavratmelkeyboard-support
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