Jonathan Balls
Lead Architect (BBC News, Weather And World Service)
Manchester, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJonathan Balls is a Lead Architect at the BBC with 11 years of experience designing resilient web and API platforms for high-visibility, real-time services including News, Weather, Sport and Live events. He blends hands-on engineering—spanning backend systems, semantic data and frontend component design—with strategic architecture work that connects product, ops and executive stakeholders. Past roles include technical leadership at Corporation Pop and pioneering interaction tech at a university medialab, where he built collaborative multi-touch and multiuser tools that remain in use globally. An active contributor to open-source monitoring tooling (Cabot), he focuses on pragmatic, test-backed improvements such as alert plugin support and unit-test reliability. Based in Manchester, he’s known for translating complex requirements into reusable, maintainable systems and for spotting reuse opportunities across large estates.
11 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
BSc, Media Production and Technology, 1st Class, BSc, Media Production and Technology, 1st Class at University of Central LancashirePaston College
English
Github Skills (9)
alertdialog10
monitoring10
alertifyjs10
alertview10
alerts10
python10
unit-test10
django10
devops5
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
arachnys/cabot
Nov 2014 - Feb 2015
Self-hosted, easily-deployable monitoring and alerts service - like a lightweight PagerDuty
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:10 commits, 7 PRs, 39 comments in 3 months
Contributions summary:Jonathan contributed to the backend of the Cabot monitoring service by modifying alert functionalities, specifically addressing inactive user notifications. They updated and fixed unit tests, ensuring the reliability of the alerting system. Furthermore, the user implemented support for alert plugins, introducing a flexible architecture for integrating various notification methods.
pythondeployabledevopsdjangohosted
pedsm/Vikings-of-Christiania
Apr 2017 - Nov 2020
Vikings of Christiania
Contributions:46 pushes in 3 years 7 months
vikings
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