James Hobbs

James Hobbs

CTO for Startups & Scaleups

Part-time technical leadership to build scalable SaaS, marketplaces, and data platforms.

What I Do

I work with Seed to Series B startups to build scalable technology, fix delivery bottlenecks, and prepare for funding rounds—without over-hiring or painful rewrites.

Most clients engage me 1–3 days per week, getting CTO-level expertise without the cost of a full-time hire.

Core Services:

  • Technical strategy & scalable architecture
  • Engineering team building & leadership
  • Code quality, CI/CD, and delivery optimisation
  • AI integration (Generative, Evaluative, Agentic)
  • SOC2 / ISO27001 compliance preparation

Experience Highlights

Deepnote (YC-backed, $23.5M funding) — Preparing for Series B; lifted engineering standards, shipped enterprise features on time for major clients

Remo.co (acquired by Events.com) — Led through hypergrowth to exit; 99.99% uptime; SOC2/ISO27001 compliance; cut infrastructure costs 80%

Festicket (UK's 6th fastest-growing startup) — Scaled team from 3 to 17; re-architected for 1000% revenue growth

BBC (400M+ users) — Senior Engineering Manager for BBC News & World Service; AWS migration, >99.99% uptime, £9M budget

Credentials

Chartered Engineer (CEng), Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS) | MSc in Software Engineering, Executive MBA | Executive education at Harvard, MIT Sloan, and Wharton