I'm Matt James, a physicist and software developer.

I currently work at Memgraph as a DevOps Build Engineer, focusing on CI and infrastructure projects while contributing to the open-source community.

I hold a PhD in space plasma physics from the University of Leicester, where I researched within the Planetary Science group (formerly Radio and Space Plasma Physics Group). My work involved analysing spacecraft data (FUV imaging, particle spectra, magnetic and electric fields) and ground-based instrumentation (ionospheric radars, magnetometers) to investigate ULF waves in Mercury's and Earth's magnetospheres. I developed and trained machine learning models to classify particle spectra and to model magnetospheric plasma distributions.

Between my research work and my time at Memgraph, I worked as an AI/backend developer, contributing to APIs, infrastructure, audio source separation models, and recommender systems. I also have experience as a senior LLM engineer, where I trained models to distinguish between human and AI utterances and supported dialogue-based ORPO training. Additionally, I worked on training graph digitization models using PyTorch.

I enjoy using code to solve difficult problems, especially when I can learn something new along the way. In my free time, you'll usually find me experimenting with my servers or developing custom LLMs from scratch. The more challenging the problem, the better.