James Stopford

I lead the build-out of Amsted Digital Solutions' data platform: a production Azure data lakehouse on ADLS Gen2, fully managed with Terraform, powering self-service analytics for rail fleet intelligence.

• ▹ Designed and shipped Bronze/Silver/Gold pipelines on ADLS Gen2 + Iceberg for high-volume device telemetry and operational data, with time-partitioned Parquet landing and private endpoint security.
• ▹ Stood up Apache Polaris (Iceberg REST catalog) and Trino on AKS, and deployed Apache Superset as the primary self-service BI and SQL layer.
• ▹ Established the platform's foundations: schema registry, contract-first modeling, Architecture Decision Records, security posture, and an RBAC/governance framework.

I led the core rail telematics and asset-management platforms — event-driven systems that turn a firehose of railcar signals into real-time fleet visibility across thousands of assets.

• ▹ The heart of it is an event-sourced asset-management platform with real-time profiling and predictive sequencing, fed by pipelines that process 4M+ events a day with exactly-once guarantees.
• ▹ Just as important was the work outside the code: partnering with hardware engineering and rail ops to nail down requirements and prove things out in production.

Led a team of five to build the vulnerability and threat management platform that became the foundation of an enterprise cyber-security offering — including a large-scale threat intelligence system that pulled, analyzed, and securely delivered content from across the public internet and dark web.

The sole developer embedded in an operational account management team, where I hunted for high-impact automation and integration opportunities and built the production tooling to deliver on them — custom integrations and automation that measurably improved efficiency for large enterprise customers.