University of Pennsylvania

Engineering at Google

Oakland, California, United States

Google

Engineering

I manage Device Software, which consists of all software on our devices, along with mobile and site services necessary for critical device functionality.

Fitbit

Vice President Of Engineering

- Led successful cross-functional effort to scale site in anticipation of Christmas traffic.
-  Kick-started payments project, then led technical due diligence in support of Coin acquisition
-  Responsible for strategic platform roadmap for the software organization
-  Creator of prototypes which cannot be described
-  more to come...

Principal Software Engineer

I spent 4 years at Twitter and naturally wore several hats during my time there. As an individual contributor I was the lead engineer on several performance, scalability, and developer productivity efforts. As an engineering manager I helped grow the Developer Productivity team from 5 to 30 engineers and was responsible for supporting an engineering organization that grew from ~250 to 1500 engineers over the same time period, with an IPO thrown in for good measure.

Twitter

Senior Software Engineer & Senior Engineering Manager

As the senior member of <a href="http://Salesforce.com">Salesforce.com</a>'s Performance Engineering group, I was heavily involved in many notable projects including:

-  Our migration from Oracle 9i to 10g
-  The addition of memcached into the architecture
-  The spin-up of our first remote, active datacenter in Singapore
-  Our migration from 32 to 64-bit Java

While at Salesforce I also was often involved in developing performance tools including large-scale data creation tools, several workload generators unique to the company, and was a contributor to an effort to use an existing body of functional tests for early performance validation.

Third party tools I either was directly responsible for or helped introduce include JMeter, Spirent Avalanche, Shunra Storm, and Dynatrace.

Salesforce.com

Principal Member of Technical Staff, Performance Engineering

OpSource is a managed hosting company with a SaaS focus. Initially I worked within the Engineering group as the architect for the customer portal, and then in March '06 I moved into the Operations group, creating the Application Engineering discipline within the company. The group’s role is to identify and resolve performance and scalability challenges in our customer’s applications.

OpSource

Principal Engineer

Truereq was an enterprise product and requirements management tool built on a SaaS model. I was responsible for architecting the product from the initial investor demo until our 1.0 release. The product had both a rich Java client and browser-based interface built on top of a SOAP back end.

Truereq

Co-founder & VP Engineering

Consulted on various Internet development projects. Clients included:

Eyematic Interface -- developed web interface to 3d multimedia messaging system for cell phones (Shout Messenger)

Adaptec -- developed online configurator for selected VARs

ChevronTexaco -- developed 3d geo interface for system visualization & control

Hive Theory

Consultant

SF Interactive was an interactive advertising agency interested in growing a budding technology organization. My responsibilities encompassed team building, client management and sales support, proposal development, project management, board and investor relations, and some development as appropriate. In 2001 it was acquired by Butler, Shine & Stern, a traditional advertising agency.

SF Interactive

Chief Technology Officer

Sales/Investor support, proposal development, process engineering, team building, merger integration (IF! bought Construct).

Illusion Fusion!

Construct was a boutique Internet design agency with a focus on seamlessly combining visual aesthetics with technical wizardry. As a result of our bleeding edge development skills, we amassed an enviable client list including Microsoft, Netscape, Intel, Silicon Graphics, Sony Online Entertainment, and AT&T Bell Labs, among others. My role varied dynamically as required, but was always focused on solving our most difﬁcult technical challenges. We were acquired in early 1999 by Click3X and the combined entities were rebranded IllusionFusion!, a name which proved all too prophetic.

James Waldrop