James Socol

James Socol is an experienced engineering leader who excels in managing distributed and colocated teams. He focuses on creating inclusive environments and facilitating the growth of developers and managers. With a servant-management style, James emphasizes clarity on mission, goals, and expectations to ensure success and high performance while removing barriers for his teams. He values long-term product development and ownership, promoting metric-driven decision-making based on data and product knowledge.

James enjoys collaborating closely with cross-functional groups such as design, product, analytics, and data teams, which has led to significant career breakthroughs. He has spearheaded various engineering-organization-level initiatives, including improving interview processes, developing career ladders, and enhancing planning and goal-setting procedures.

As an engineer, James specializes in distributed systems and architectures. While he has full-stack web experience with JavaScript/React, Python/Django+Flask, and Golang, he has also worked with numerous other programming languages in the past. James has a strong background in building and advocating for continuous delivery systems and maintaining popular open source projects.

For nearly a decade, James successfully managed TodaysMeet, an esteemed educational chat platform, as a side project. This platform, tailored for classroom teachers, impacted millions of students and provided valuable learning experiences for James.

James Socol holds a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Michigan State University. Throughout his career, he has held key roles in renowned organizations like Fastly, Policygenius Inc., Condé Nast, The Groundwork, bitly, Mozilla Corporation, and Suborbital, LLC, showcasing his diverse expertise and leadership capabilities.