Definitively Not( James )

James Ward

Level 13 Software Engineer

Experience Points

Engineering Manager

CesiumAstro

September 2025 Current
Providing software-defined communication systems and mission-ready satellites.
  • Supported the acquisition of Vidrovr and integration of the Vidrovr platform with CesiumAstro's missions.
  • Manager for flight and ground software on the Element Satellite mission.

Director of Engineering

Vidrovr

February 2024 September 2025
Automating video analysis to support better decision making. (Acquired by CesiumAstro)
  • Provided guidance for technical and professional growth to all members of the engineering team.
  • Implemented observability and automated recovery in Kubernetes to reduce mean time to recovery from hours to minutes.
  • Introduced unit testing, integration testing, and local environments for feature validation - leading to more reliabile deployments and a reduction in unexpected defects.
  • Improved the operational maturity of the engineering team to match NIST SP 800-171r3 compliance controls, achieving a DoD Authorization to Operate to fulfill USAF contracts.
  • Created a strong hiring structure and pipeline to build out a software engineering team.

Engineering

HumanFirst

October 2020 February 2024
Building software to enable safe, effective, and equitable healthcare operations at home. (Acquired by ICON)
  • Kept the engineering team's technical strategy aligned with business goals to deliver products driven by both data and user feedback - from the first lines of code of our public API to delivering lines of features that closed sales.
  • Led the engineering team to SOC2 and HIPAA readiness via creation of disaster recovery plans using infrastructure as code, incident preparedness playbooks, and features to support the principles of least privilege.
  • Developed best practices for both the Typescript backend and React frontend as well as automations to keep the team aligned to those practices.

Senior Engineering Manager

Venmo

October 2018 December 2019
  • Develop cross-functional initiatives migrating Venmo to a distributed architecture.
  • Brought reliability from 90% to 99.999% - from 73 hours to less than 30 seconds of downtime per month.
  • Coordinate DEI recruiting initiatives to improve representation of underrepresented groups in hiring.

Senior Engineering Manager

Wayfair

February 2014 February 2017

Software Architect

Accrisoft

February 2011 April 2012

Tools I Enjoy

  • Java
    Spring, Hibernate, Dropwizard, Storm, Spark
  • PHP
    Laravel, Symfony
  • SQL
    MySQL, MariaDB, T-SQL, PostgreSQL, CockroachDB
  • Cobol
    COBOL-85
  • Pascal
    Delphi
  • Python
    FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, Django, Twisted, Pandas, Keras, Tornado, Celery
  • Infrastructure
    Linux, Kubernetes, Docker, Helm, Puppet, Terraform, Pulumi, AWS
  • Javascript
    Typescript, NextJS, Node, Webpack, Express, Tensorflow.js, React, React Native, Expo
  • NoSQL
    HBase, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis, ValKey, DynamoDB, Cassandra
  • CSS
    CSS3, SASS, LESS
  • Perl
    Mojolicious, CGI
  • C++
    Boost
  • C
    C11, C99, CMake, ncurses, Unity
Experience points truncated for optimal viewing. Detailed points prior to October 2018 available upon request.