James Cross

Colibri is a technology consultancy company founded in 2015 by James Cross and Ingrid Funie. The company works to help its clients navigate the rapidly changing and complex world of emerging technologies, with deep expertise in areas like big data, data science, machine learning, and cloud computing. Over the past few years, they have worked with some of the world's largest and most prestigious companies, including a tier 1 investment bank, a leading management consultancy group, and one of the world's most popular soft drinks companies, helping each of them to make better sense of its data, and process it in more intelligent ways. The company lives by its motto: Data -> Intelligence -> Action.
James Cross is a Big Data Engineer and certified AWS Solutions Architect with a passion for data-driven applications. He's spent the last 3-5 years helping his clients to design and implement huge-scale, streaming big data platforms, cloud-based analytics stacks, and serverless architectures.
He started his professional career in Investment Banking, working with well-established technologies such as Java and SQL Server, before moving into the Big Data space. Since then he's worked with a huge range of big data tools including most of the Hadoop eco-system, Spark, and many No-SQL technologies such as Cassandra, MongoDB, Redis, and DynamoDB. More recently his focus has been on cloud technologies and how they can be applied to data analytics, culminating in his work at Scout Solutions as CTO, and more recently with Mckinsey.
James is an AWS certified solutions architect with several years' experience designing and implementing solutions on this cloud platform. As CTO of Scout Solutions Ltd, he built a fully serverless set of APIs and an analytics stack based around Lambda and Redshift.