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 severless 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 API's and analytics stack based around Lambda and Redshift. He is interested in almost anything that has to do with technology. He has worked with everything from Wordpress to Hadoop, from C++ to Java, and from Oracle to DynamoDB. If it's new and solves a problem in an innovative way he's keen to give it a go!