About
Built by an engineer who's been
shipping software that matters.
I'm James Drummond, and Yellow Melon is my studio. 10+ years in fintech on a product with end clients including Credit Suisse and JP Morgan, an ongoing accounting platform for Universal Music Group, a SaaS exit — and now agentic AI workflows.
About me
Over a decade of software that had to work.
I've spent my career working in environments where software failure isn't an option. I spent over ten years in fintech in London, security cleared at the time, working on a product whose end clients included Credit Suisse, JP Morgan and various UK government agencies. Since 2021 I've been working with Universal Music Group (via the team at Ingrooves, now Virgin Music Group) on a deal-management and accounting platform that processes over a billion transactions every month.
I also spent two years in fashion tech, including as lead front-end developer on allsaints.com — a million-visitor e-commerce platform with sales days regularly exceeding £1M — and worked with one of London's top design studios on the front end of a blockchain-based card-trading game used by Premier League football clubs.
In parallel, I founded and exited Smoothbook.co — an online appointment system for yoga and fitness studios, processing 120,000+ bookings and $100,000+ in transactions every month for studios around the world. Smoothbook was acquired by a US company in early 2024.
I graduated with honours from the British Columbia Institute of Technology and started my career in server-side C++. My stack today is TypeScript, Node.js, React and MongoDB, with hands-on experience across Docker, deployment and VPS infrastructure.
Yellow Melon is the continuation of that work. The positioning is simple: senior engineering judgment, combined with agentic AI workflows. AI agents can genuinely improve software and business processes — and they can introduce real risk. I help businesses use them where they create value, and design the surrounding software, controls and workflows that make them reliable and safe.
I completed the Agentic Engineering program at Johns Hopkins University in September 2026. I work from Tulum, Mexico, on US Eastern time.
How I work
The Yellow Melon principles.
Judgment first, code second.
Before any code is written, I work out what the right thing to build actually is. Experience means I catch the hard problems in design, not halfway through the budget.
AI accelerates execution, not decisions.
Agentic tools write, test and iterate at a pace a full team couldn't match two years ago. But what to build, how to structure it, where to push back — those calls still belong to the senior engineer driving.
Built for North American business.
US English, USD pricing, US and Canadian business-hours coverage. Yellow Melon serves clients primarily across North America, with secondary work in the UK and Europe.
Honest pricing, honest timelines.
Fixed-scope or time-and-materials, depending on what makes sense for your project. No surprise invoices, no scope creep disguised as progress.
Let's talk about your project.
Every good engagement starts with a conversation. No obligation, no pressure — just a chance to figure out whether I'm a good fit.
Working with teams across the US, Canada, UK and Europe