James Stevenson

Transformational Development Director with over 10 years of senior engineering leadership experience backed by a strong, hands-on technical foundation in scalable enterprise environments. Expert at taking complete ownership of cross-functional engineering functions, stabilizing high-risk complex platforms, and engineering robust delivery frameworks from the ground up. Proven track record of navigating turnaround/rescue situations under immense commercial pressure while aligning technological roadmaps directly with strategic business value.

Highly skilled in cultivating distributed engineering cultures, reducing attrition, and scaling technical organizations from 15 to 50+ engineers.

Development Director / Head of Software Engineering NCUB | Totalmobile | Vianet Group (Remote) 2018– Present London & Belfast, UK • Engineering Transformation: Formulated and executed an overarching delivery strategy that scaled a globally distributed, remote-first engineering department from 15 to 50+ engineers.

• Platform Modernization & Rescue: Stepped into a high-pressure environment to successfully rescue a failing, business-critical legacy platform, restoring service availability and securing essential commercial value.
• Fiscal Ownership: Generated multi-million-pound operational cost savings through the aggressive consolidation of cloud architectures across AWS/Azure and strategic modernizations of legacy applications.
• Culture &Delivery Alignment: Standardized software engineering metrics and built transparent delivery pipelines; drastically mitigated developer attrition by deploying transparent professional progression frameworks. Head of Development National Centre for Universities and Business (NCUB) (Remote) 2023– Present London, UK • Technical Direction: Spearheaded the seamless migration of legacy.NET and Java software monoliths into highthroughput, modern cloud environments tailored for streaming industrial IoT data.
• Hands-on Governance: Maintained close proximity to production code bases, governing architecture patterns and high-performance pipeline configurations using C#, Java, MongoDb and SQL.
• Stakeholder Management: Translated complex technological concepts into tangible business indicators for executive leadership, ensuring engineering milestones directly drove organizational growth.

Senior Software Engineer & Tech Lead

GAM|Northern Trust | Morgan Stanley (Remote) 2001– 2018 London, UK • Delivery Execution: Mentored and led a cross-functional squad of engineers developing high-performance enterprise applications utilizing C#, Java, MongoDb and SQL.

• Operational Modernization: Drove early enterprise adoption of automated integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, minimizing deployment failures and establishing automated testing standard operating procedures.

HND in Software Engineering University of Greenwich.

International DEVOPS Practitioner Foundation (IDPF)

International Agile Test Foundation.