James works for Shane McCarthy in the Darwin Tree of Life project, on quality control of the genome assembly pipeline.

From 2016 until 2023 James worked for Hayley Francies, providing informatics support for the Gro cancer organoid derivation project, from sample reception and gathering of clinical data through to detection of cancer driver mutations in sequencing data.

Between 1998 and 2016, during the sequencing of the human genome, he worked on the development and running of genome analysis pipelines and user interfaces used by the Vertebrate Annotation team to annotate the genes in the human, mouse and zebrafish genomes.