James Shiell
Vice President Engineering at Springer Nature
St Albans, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Shiell is a seasoned engineering leader with nearly two decades of hands-on software and architectural experience, now serving as Vice President Engineering at Springer Nature. He has led large, cross-functional engineering organisations and delivery of cloud-native Java and Kotlin microservices, guiding a 250-person digital engineering capability and steering product-focused, iterative delivery. Technically grounded, he contributes to open-source—enhancing the popular http4k Kotlin toolkit with Zipkin tracing, GZip handling, and cookie/trace-thread improvements—bringing observability and resilience to distributed systems. His background spans enterprise systems, performance-tuned gaming platforms, and complex content platforms like SpringerLink and Nature, giving him practical depth from low-level services to product strategy. Based in St Albans, he combines pragmatic engineering leadership with a playful human touch—often via video calls brightened by an exceedingly fluffy dog.
19 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts - BA, Computer Science, Dramatic Arts, Bachelor of Arts - BA, Computer Science, Dramatic Arts at The University of Waikato
Github Skills (10)
http4k10
kotlin10
immutability-helper10
http10
http-client10
http-server10
immutability10
testability9
typesafe9
opentelemetry9
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
http4k/http4k
Jun 2018 - May 2022
The Functional toolkit for Kotlin HTTP applications. http4k provides a simple and uniform way to serve, consume, and test HTTP services.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 reviews, 36 commits, 21 PRs in 3 years 11 months
Contributions summary:James primarily focused on enhancing the functionality of the `http4k/http4k` project, specifically implementing support for Zipkin traces, including propagating headers and integrating with sampling decisions. They also worked on adding and improving GZip compression and decompressing capabilities for both requests and responses, to provide efficient handling of content. Furthermore, the user made several improvements to the codebase to support multiple "cookie" headers and also included support for copying trace information to child worker threads.
http4khttp-clienthttp-servicesservetypesafe
springernature/buildpack-update-action
Sep 2021 - Jan 2022
Contributions:1 release, 72 commits, 41 pushes in 3 months
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