James Mallison

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT JAMES MALLISON

OverviewSkilled both at the technical level and also in management and leadership. An Engineering Manager and technical leader with over a decade of experience in several industries. Several years of leadership experience in Engineering Management roles, also as a Head of Engineering leading multiple teams and EMs.Currently back as a Staff Engineer working on distributed systems with cross-org impact and enjoying it. I can easily see myself in a leadership role again in the future - software was never the challenge, people are.Tech backgroundSoftware Engineering, PHP and Go, proven experience in building teams, distributed systems (monolith to microservice migrations, and back!), and mentoring others both privately and globally as an internationally recognised conference speaker. To date I\'ve spoken in several countries\' conferences in Europe with audiences in the hundreds and to some usergroups and companies.Tech -> Management Skills Roadmap- 2018 - Learned Swift and built an iOS app with multithreading and async/await- 2019 - Learned Go. Two months in I wrote open-source Go libraries on GitHub and did a talk at a conference on attempting to automate Dependency Injection in Go- 2020 - Switched my focus to leadership, with mentors who have mentored CEOs, at Sixt- 2021 - Took on an Engineering Manager role- 2022 - Took on a Head of Engineering role- 2024/2025 - Not letting skills disappear in Engineering-At Sixt, I successfully led a team of 7 Engineers to rewrite an over-engineered project. Onboarding time before rewrite: 3 months for 2x seniors. After: 3 weeks for 3 mid-levels. Key tech- Distributed Systems- Domain Driven Design- Golang- Event Sourcing, CQRS- Postgres, Kafka- ELK stack, Prometheus etc-At trivago, I led and mentored two teams of senior and mid-level developers and operations on the from-scratch creation of distributed systems bringing in several hundred million euros a year. I was responsible for 1:1s, development plans, managing expectations with stakeholders, sprint planning / prioritisation for both teams, interviewing and hiring developers, mentoring and making architectural decisions with developers and diving in and contributing directly each week- PHP, ELK, Symfony- Google Adwords / Bing Ads- Selenium / Webdriver (Behat)- RabbitMQ, Redis, SOAP (unfortunately!)- Automating CI/CD pipelines, Devops- An agile mindset, sprints, retros, all the agile, JIRA- Almost burning out-I previously accidentally automated entire government departments as a University student.