James Watts

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Senior Engineering Manager, PwC - Elasticsearch · Scala · Python

PwC
Bristol, UK · GMT (UTC+0)
10+ years experience
King's College London
English, Arabic
Advising
Messaging unavailable

Overview

Based in Bristol. I lead search and ranking at PwC. Grew the search team from 4 to 37 engineers. Before that: Bloomberg and Amazon.

Good reasons to reach out
  • Advice on search and ranking
  • Working sessions on Python
  • Speaking or podcast invitations
  • Questions about search and ranking
Please don't message about
  • Offshore staffing offers
  • SEO and link-building offers

Replies within two days

Skills
TypeScriptScalaElasticsearchPython
AdvisingOpen to advising
closes in 3 months

Office hours for teams scaling past 50 engineers: search and ranking and TypeScript

Topics
search and ranking, Elasticsearch, Python
Format
Office hours
Terms
Paid
Capacity
One call a month
Best for
First-time founders

12 years of search and ranking. Small equity or paid hours - flexible.

Bristol, UK · remote OKscalatypescriptpython
Open

Experience

  1. Senior Engineering Manager
    Feb 2025 - Present
    PwC · 1 yr 8 mo · Full-time · Bristol, UK
    • Moved 69% of search traffic off a legacy monolith without a customer-facing incident.
    • Mentored 14 engineers through their first promotion.
  2. Senior Software Engineer
    Oct 2022 - Feb 2025
    Bloomberg · 2 yr 4 mo · Full-time · Bristol, UK
    • Shipped 26 launches on the search team without a rollback.
  3. Staff Software Engineer
    Nov 2020 - Oct 2022
    Amazon · 1 yr 11 mo · Full-time · Bristol, UK
    • Led the migration of 66 services to TypeScript.
  4. Software Engineer
    Mar 2019 - Aug 2020
    NatWest · 1 yr 5 mo · Full-time · Bristol, UK
    • Moved 69% of search traffic off a legacy monolith without a customer-facing incident.
  5. Senior Software Engineer
    Feb 2017 - Mar 2019
    Meta · 2 yr 1 mo · Full-time · Bristol, UK
    • Reduced cloud spend on search by 28% in two quarters.

References

No references yet.

Education

  1. King's College London
    BSc, Mathematics
    2011 - 2014

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