James Hobbs Discuss an engagement

Experience

Selected work from my independent practice, executive roles and experience as a founder. These examples show the situations I have worked through, my responsibilities and the results. Some engagements remain confidential.

Recent independent work

Alongside coaching and advisory work, I take responsibility for practical improvements in products, engineering and delivery.

Deepnote: reducing costs and supporting an AI product transition

Deepnote is one of my current engagements. I am helping the product move from a data science platform to an agentic AI workspace, raising AI-native engineering standards and improving enterprise delivery.

As part of this work, I reduced server costs by 40%. This is an achieved saving within an ongoing engagement.

Remo

Chief Technology Officer 2021 to 2024

Context

Remo is a video platform for virtual events and remote offices. Demand grew sharply during the pandemic, contracted afterwards, and the company was later acquired by Events.com.

My role

  • Led a globally distributed, 24/7 technology organisation spanning GMT−8 to GMT+8
  • Managed engineering managers, DevOps and hands-on engineers, and a multi-million-dollar technology budget

What I did

  • Integrated off-the-shelf real-time video to carry the load of large live events
  • Improved CI/CD and operational resilience, achieving approximately 99.99% uptime and reducing recovery time from live-event failures to under one minute
  • Reduced infrastructure and vendor spend while keeping quality high
  • Took the organisation through SOC 2 and ISO 27001

Outcomes

  • Infrastructure and vendor spend cut by more than 80% over 14 months
  • Approximately 99.99% uptime, with recovery from live-event failures in under one minute
  • SOC 2 and ISO 27001 achieved
  • Technology led through hypergrowth, contraction and acquisition by Events.com

My role was leading technology and engineering through the acquisition.

Related: Coaching and supporting CTOs and heads of engineering, Helping boards with technology strategy, investment and risk, Leading through growth, transitions and acquisitions, Navigating security, compliance and responsible AI.

BBC News, Weather and World Service

Senior Software Engineering Manager 2017 to 2021

Context

BBC News and World Service reach a global audience of 400 million people, including audiences in countries that censor independent news.

My role

  • Led a 50-person engineering team as part of a leadership trio
  • Shared responsibility for a £9M annual budget
  • Served on the BBC’s digital strategy board, one of approximately 12–15 members overseeing digital strategy across the organisation, including enterprise architecture and software engineering standards

What I did

  • Moved from a legacy PHP monolith on premises to a resilient AWS platform
  • Rolled out HTTPS and a Tor mirror to protect audiences and reach people under censorship
  • Rebuilt compliant international ad delivery to support monetisation
  • Founded Simorgh, the BBC World Service’s open-source project powering the world’s fastest multilingual news sites and reaching tens of millions of people each week

Explore Simorgh, the BBC World Service’s open-source project

Outcomes

  • Uptime above 99.99% after the move to AWS
  • Protected access for audiences in countries that censor news

The audience figure describes the reach of BBC News and World Service, not users of systems I built alone. Budget and leadership were shared within a trio.

Related: Coaching and supporting CTOs and heads of engineering, Helping boards with technology strategy, investment and risk, Navigating security, compliance and responsible AI.

Festicket

Interim CTO and Technical Lead 2015 to 2017

Context

Festicket sold festival travel packages through a two-sided marketplace, and was the UK’s sixth fastest-growing startup in 2017.

My role

  • Joined as product and technical project manager, then took over technical leadership from the founding CTO after a structured handover
  • Managed a £1M annual technology budget

What I did

  • Reengineered the platform to support substantial increases in concurrent demand during a period of more than 1,000% revenue growth
  • Grew the team across engineering, QA, data science and IT through Series B and C
  • Controlled cost through a mix of off-the-shelf, open-source and custom tools
  • Delivered machine-learning-driven marketing automation focused on retention and repeat purchases

Outcomes

  • Team grew from 3 to 17
  • The platform supported more than 1,000% revenue growth

Revenue growth was a company result; the platform work supported it.

Related: A trusted partner for founders, Coaching and supporting CTOs and heads of engineering, Leading through growth, transitions and acquisitions.

Fill My Weekend

Founder & CEO February 2013 to December 2017

I founded Fill My Weekend, bootstrapped it into a profitable events technology business with more than 30,000 members, and exited the business. I remained hands-on with its technology and personally hosted hundreds of events.

Leading the business and its technology while hosting events kept commercial decisions close to the experience of the people paying for them.

Discuss an engagement

Tell me what you’re working through. We can explore whether there’s a fit and discuss scope and timing.

Earlier experience

  • Led post-merger IT integration at Global University Systems, serving 15,000+ students
  • Co-led a hydrogen fuel R&D startup, managing patent development and a £200,000 operational budget. Regularly presented the technology to boards of publicly listed companies
  • Delivered mobile-first tracking software for multimodal logistics