JW Jim Wright

About me

I’m a senior/staff software engineer with a decade of experience building and operating the infrastructure behind large-scale, real-time systems. I’ve led cloud migrations and platform teams at Cisco ThousandEyes and SamKnows, and I independently design and ship complete products end to end, from backend architecture through billing and release engineering.

I started out making games in Flash and writing an IRC client to earn a Trials2 achievement, went on to study Computing (BSc, 2:1) at Canterbury Christ Church University, and have worked across the stack ever since.

Experience

Cisco ThousandEyes: Software Engineering Technical Leader (2023 – 2026)

Led a team of five, architecting ThousandEyes’ integration of SamKnows following its acquisition.

  • Architected a zero-downtime migration of 50+ services from GCP to AWS, including middleware that translated legacy API keys and auth so existing and new customers were served without disruption.
  • Designed the Terraform and Kubernetes approach for the new environment and led the application changes needed to pass extensive penetration testing.
  • Led an observability overhaul (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, alerting, runbooks) across every migrated service.
  • Designed a real-time measurement pipeline feeding the alerting platform, and a replacement agent-to-server protocol in Go using gRPC and Protobuf.
  • Moved a monolithic API and database to domain-owned gRPC services fronted by per-UI REST backends for frontends.
  • Awarded Superhero of the Quarter, selected company-wide.

SamKnows: Senior Platform Engineer (2021 – 2023)

Founded and led the platform team. Led the migration from fully self-hosted infrastructure to GCP-native (Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Terraform, MySQL, Redis), and built a custom CD pipeline that updated ArgoCD manifests from GitHub webhooks.

uMotif: Senior Backend Engineer (2021)

Helped design a clinical trial data capture system that enforces scheduled, verifiable submissions, and built the team’s first domain-structured microservice using hexagonal architecture.

SamKnows: Senior Software Engineer (2020 – 2021)

Built the Go WebSocket API behind realspeed.com, enabling real-time performance testing across 40M+ reachable agents, implemented SAML SSO for a major UK ISP, and maintained a data pipeline processing 2 billion measurements a day.

Earlier roles

Software engineer at Infinity.co (2019) and at the London Internet Exchange (2017 – 2019), where I built automation for configuring live exchange switches and helped define IX-API, an open industry standard for service provisioning across internet exchanges. Before that, developer at Submission Technology (2014 – 2017), building ad-serving and email platforms and introducing Cassandra, Kafka, Spark and microservices.

Independent projects

  • FlippingRS: a full-stack SaaS for Old School RuneScape traders. Go, Vue, MySQL, Stripe billing, and a market-data engine that streams live prices to the browser.
  • Flockdeck: a cross-platform desktop app, written in Go and shipped as a single binary, for running multiple coding agents side by side. In active development.
  • Stash Grabber: a physics heist platformer in Godot with a procedural level generator, Steam leaderboards and Workshop support. Coming to Early Access.

Skills

  • Languages: Go, PHP, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, Kotlin, GDScript
  • Data: MySQL, MariaDB, Cassandra, MongoDB, Redis, Kafka, Spark
  • Infrastructure: AWS, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, ArgoCD, Jenkins
  • Architecture: microservices, hexagonal and domain-driven design, gRPC, event-driven and real-time systems

Get in touch

You can find me on LinkedIn, GitHub and Stack Overflow, and there is a full CV to download.

About this site

I write here to solidify my understanding of a topic and to keep track of what I’ve been working on. Hopefully other people find these posts at least mildly interesting or educational. The site is built with Hugo.