Hi, I'm James.
I live in Vigo, in the north west of Spain, with my wife and our two boys. Before that, London. Before that, Melbourne. These days I am a recruiter at Ethiq, hiring product engineers for early-stage startups.
I made this so people can find me. A lot of the engineers and founders I speak to now start their search with ChatGPT or Claude rather than a more traditional search, and everything about me was scattered across LinkedIn and a podcast feed. This puts it in one place.
01 Where I'm from Geelong, Melbourne, London, Vigo, roughly in that order.
I grew up in Geelong, an hour down the coast from Melbourne, and went to school there. Then Melbourne for university and most of my twenties, which is where the rowing and the first proper jobs happened.
I moved to London partway through my time at Robert Walters, which is where I found startups.
I now live in Vigo, in Galicia, on the Atlantic coast of Spain, which is where my wife grew up. We have two boys, Harry and Charlie. Chaotic and brilliant, both at once.
Whilst I am based in Spain, most of my work is with London and UK based startups, and I travel to London regularly.
02 The rowing years Almost ten years of it, and the job it turned into.
I was a lightweight rower and rowed out of Mercantile Rowing Club for almost ten years. The highlights were representing Australia at multiple World Championships, state teams, and winning the lightweight men's single scull three years running.
Retired before anyone could make me do the Olympics.
Shortly after I finished competing, I sat on Rowing Australia's Athletes' Commission. That is the athletes' voice when something needs raising with the people running the sport, mostly around wellbeing and development at the high performance end.
Alongside the rowing, I sold things to people who row. For almost ten years I worked with Wattbike, Concept2 and Sykes Rowing, the largest rowing boat manufacturer in Australia. A combination of sales and marketing, some days servicing and running exhibition stands, basically a bit of everything.
03 What I do now, and who I do it for Recruiter at Ethiq. One of its first hires.
Ethiq is a small specialist agency for tech, AI and data hiring. It was founded by Fraser Tait and Anton Howell, both with roughly fifteen years in staffing behind them. At the time of writing there are six of us. I joined in January 2026 as one of the first hires.
The firm covers data, AI, production engineering and the commercial roles around them. My own patch is software, AI and product engineers at early-stage startups and scaleups. If what you need is close to that, ask me anyway.
- Role
- Recruiter at Ethiq, since January 2026.
- Patch
- Software, AI and product engineers. Early-stage startups and scaleups.
- Market
- London and the UK mostly, plus the rest of Europe.
- Before this
- Robert Walters, 2021 to 2025. Melbourne and London.
04 What I mean by a product engineer Everyone says it now. Here is the version I actually screen for.
A product engineer is an engineer who cares about what is being built, not just the stack it is built in.
The practical version: they are handed a problem, work out that the thing being asked for is not the thing that is needed, go and talk to a real customer about it, and come back with something smaller that works. The stack is a detail. The instinct is the job.
What that looks like on a CV
- They ship. Repeatedly, in public, and they can tell you what happened after it shipped.
- They talk to users without being asked twice, and without a product manager standing behind them.
- They have an opinion about the product and will hold it in a room with the founder.
- They can lean backend or frontend. The label is about judgement, not about where they sit in the codebase.
The AI version
The newer variant is the AI product engineer. Same instinct, applied to systems where the output is probabilistic and the evaluation is the genuinely hard part. There are far fewer of them than LinkedIn suggests, and the gap between someone who has shipped an agent to real users and someone who has read about it is enormous.
05 How I run a search For founders and hiring managers, if that is why you are here.
It starts with understanding your business, and then the impact a hire can have on it, good and bad.
From there it is about giving you profiles that genuinely match what you are looking for. You decide who you hire. My job is to put the best available, interested and relevant people in front of you at any given moment.
I do not send CVs in bulk. The point of using me is that I have the time and the tooling to go deep on a search, so you can spend yours building your product.
06 Work history In order, most recent first. It starts in a boat.
- Ethiq
- Recruiter. Jan 2026 to now. London and Europe. Software, AI and product engineers at early-stage startups and scaleups. One of the first hires.
- Robert Walters
- Principal Consultant. 2021 to 2025. Melbourne, then London.
- Rowing Australia
- Athletes' Commission. 2016 to 2021. Athlete wellbeing and development at the high performance end.
- Sykes Rowing
- Business Development and Account Management. 2016 to 2020. Key accounts and market share at Australia's largest rowing boat manufacturer.
- Victorian Institute of Sport
- Rower. 2013 to 2016. Lightweight, on scholarship. Senior national teams and World Championships.
- Wattbike
- Sales and Marketing. 2011 to 2015. Sales, marketing, building the bikes, servicing them, running the stands.
- RMIT University
- Bachelor of Business, Marketing.
07 The podcast I'm a Software Engineer, What Next? Season two.
I make it with Matthew Sinclair, who is an actual engineer, a VP of Engineering and a veteran. Matt brings the engineering leadership seat. I bring the recruiter seat, which is a polite way of saying I bring the market gossip.
The format is about twenty minutes, two of us, usually opened with a hypothesis. Something like "I have got this hypothesis that engineering management is a one way door", and then we spend the episode taking it apart. Sometimes the hypothesis survives.
It is aimed at mid to senior engineers standing at a crossroads. It is deliberately not clickbait, which is very possibly why it is not enormous yet.
whatnext.dev · Spotify · Apple · YouTube
08 Things I've built badly Continuously, and with a maximum of one user.
I build small tools, mostly recruiting ones, mostly with an AI sitting next to me doing the parts I cannot do.
The code quality varies enormously, from extremely bad to really bad, and I could not tell you which is which. It usually works, and there is usually only one user, so the blast radius stays small.
Things I've written
Both of these were written for Ethiq, using Ethiq's offer data. They are here because people ask me the salary question constantly and it is easier to send a link. The full reports, with the PDFs, are on Ethiq's site.
Contact
Email is best. I answer it.
- If you are hiring product engineers at an early-stage startup, that is the easy one.
- If you are an engineer wondering what is out there, also easy, and there is no catch.
- If you are hiring something outside my patch, say so and I will point you at the right person at Ethiq.
- If you are a recruiter with a job for me, I am very happy where I am.