I'm James Gardiner. I live in the United Kingdom, where I build data systems.

I'm a Principal Data Engineer at the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office, working on strategic data engineering projects to embed excellent data engineering practices at an organisational level. Before that I was Lead Data Engineer at UKHO, architecting safety critical data pipelines across the defence and commercial sectors using AWS and tools like Polars and DuckDB.

Prior to UKHO, I worked as a Senior Engineer at Genomics England on an NHS genomic medicine tool for cancer diagnoses, and as Technical Lead at AstraZeneca building deep medicine data products for genomic scientists. I've also spent several years at the Office for National Statistics, including working on the Census 2021 online service, and at Elucidata on the 100,000 Genomes Project.

Outside of work, I'm a member of the Western Beacons Mountain Rescue Team, a volunteer search and rescue team covering the western half of Bannau Brycheiniog National Park, a climber and trainee Mountain Leader.

This blog is where I share my thoughts on data engineering, Python, and other technical topics.