James Fallisgaard Email & Phone Number

New York, New York, Us

Ethena is a compliance training platform—with informative, cringe-free content delivered via innovative methods—that actually works.Ethena's training is trusted by top tech companies including Netflix, Zendesk, Figma, Zoom, and others. We’re backed by Felicis, GSV, Homebrew, Village Global, and other aligned investors, and were profiled in Tech Crunch and Forbes. Our advisory team includes top Legal and People Ops professionals such as Frances Frei and Cindy Moehring.

New York, Ny, Us

• Grew the Communications Platform team from 2 to 9 fullstack software engineers, owning the comms tools (voice, email, sms, in-app messaging) and related backend microservices utilized by several thousand internal staff.• Led team, along with my PM, through a year long custom communication platform project from requirement gathering, to build/buy decisioning, and ultimately ground-up planning and execution. Included several microservices and a custom electron app, migration of 4k employees to the new system with zero interruption to their day-to-day, and ended up saving Better millions in ongoing IT, vendor and defect costs, and unlocked years of future product runway along the way.• Experienced not only growing, hiring and stabilizing teams, but also splitting / spinning out teams to respond to business/product shifts including defining new charters and transitioning teammates, products and technical ownership as seamlessly as possible.• Pushed to improve our team’s SRE game, from getting solid on-call pagerduty rotations going, to benchmarking system performance and quality, defining automated testing standards, to focused spikes where we’d tackle big improvements in stability.• Advocated for resources and roadmap time to pre-emptively scale our team’s services as Better was exponentially growing through refactors and optimizations. Included standing up a new internal-facing React app to decouple our products from a legacy Ember frontend, a sustained background effort towards ongoing database optimizations, and also a major project to decompose our comms event processing microservice in to several purpose-built services with Kafka acting as an event bus between them, emitting events for external team customers downstream.• Administered 100+ technical interviews throughout our eng org’s explosive growth from 35 engineers to 350.• Experienced navigating complex compliance regulations and incorporating these constraints into our technical and product roadmap.

New York, Ny, Us

• Led and contributed to a massive crunch refactor of the entire codebase to make it “multi-tenant” capable in advance of a massive partnership launch with Ally Bank that could (would?) not be delayed regardless of lift. Majority of this work had to do with how we handle communications systems profiles, data, and how this data is piped throughout the codebase, hence it falling under purview of my new team.

New York, Ny, Us

• Built the credit card payment system (via Braintree) including the custom flow tied in to the conversion step of our main mortgage flow in paying a home appraisal. Also built a capability facilitating PCI-compliant credit card payments over the phone without Better ever receiving or storing customer credit card data internally.

• Built principal pages of the platform using PHP, MySQL, RESTful APIs and React JS, architecting internal campaign management tools, image and video review and version management CMS workflows, search pages, and analytics reporting.• Built CONVERSATIONS - Activate’s in-platform group messaging system, supporting many to many communication with rich media, HTML5 video, document attachments, notifications, read receipts and other content review and collaboration management action integrations.• Lead engineer on Activate's influencer search system, implementing algorithms matching influencers and campaigns, including radius search for influencers by latitude/longitude, laying the foundation for our SaaS platform.• Designed and implemented interactive analytics dashboards for users to aggregate and analyze campaign performance using Highcharts.js.• Experience building automated infrastructure to process data from third party APIs (Twitter, Google Analytics) to power the platform's matching and performance algorithms.

• Lead engineer of the team responsible for building and maintaining Bloglovin's blogging platform CMS, allowing users to create and manage posts on their own blogs.• Designed the sharded database schema for storing all the users' posts and blog content (350K posts from 35K users in 160 countries YTD).• Designed and built the platform’s commenting engine, API and web front end (53K comments from 20K users in 150 countries YTD).

• Built internal email tooling for scheduling, creating, and sending emails with automated tracking of their marketing engagement. To date, the system sends 174 million emails with 23 million opens per month.• Refactored and expanded Bloglovin' Media's programmatic ad system serving 16 million paid impressions monthly, including building automatic impression and click tracking, ad booking and automated reporting for our ad team.

• Built internal business development tools for the product team, including Splunk dashboards, alert systems, and administrative pages.• Designed and built data infrastructure to A/B test new product features for growth and retention.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

• Built an optimized large-dollar-contributing campaign donor call list (with Python and Pandas) for the TJ Cox CA-21 house campaign sorted by scored characteristics that indicate a high likelihood of relating to the candidate and their issue positions using publicly available campaign finance data.• Enriched a large dataset of potential campaign donors with publicly available contact information for Stacey Abrams’ Georgia gubernatorial campaign.• Worked with a small team of three to automate and productize this process for n candidates built on top the Tech For Campaigns campaign finance database.

• Built a Python web scraper to mine 20 years of North Korean propaganda news archives in to JSON documents that are text-indexed for search with MongoDB and PyMongo for Tufts political science grad students.• Designed and created an interactive choropleth map VS time visualization of North Korean international relations in D3.js for JavaScript, with HTML5 and CSS. Deployed with Git and GNU Make on an Ubuntu Linux VPS.• Designed and implemented a XML data fetching service and interface for handling testing definitions, a component of a refactoring of Impinj RFID’s production test software suite in C++.

Seattle, Wa, Us

• Coded and practiced the full data science workflow (designed experiments, written software employing a variety of technologies, performed statistical analyses and built visualizations) to personally drive large increases of startup’s gross margin $’s on several occasions. Greatest single impact of a single experiment/analysis I delivered was ~$1.5M.• Designed and created several large interactive dashboard visualizations to monitor Impinj RFID’s production line in TIBCO Spotfire. These dashboards were used in production for monitoring statistical process controls in a high-dimensionality high-volume manufacturing environment.• Owned build-out of RF testing software system for three generations. Wrote initial testing software in Perl, and gradually refactored test logic to merge with larger internal testing suite in C++. Defined SQL relational database schema design for system’s data. Created digital multimeter control and test module in C++.• Implemented and designed an automated data pipeline system in Perl for managing digital “wafermaps” (good/bad chip locations on a given silicon wafer) for Impinj RFID’s full silicon chip production line through delivery to customer.• Designed and carried out experiments to understand customer complaints leading to root cause analyses of quality problems. Lead subsequent corrective actions on internal processes.• Experienced working in both software engineering developer teams using Subversion and Agile SCRUM, and test/product engineering sustaining teams on “firefighting” time.SR. PRODUCT ENGINEER | June 2012 - September 2013PRODUCT ENGINEER | December 2010 - June 2012PRODUCT ENGINEERING INTERN | September 2010 - December 2010

Clear Potential developed grid-connected solar-power generating window tint based on organicphotovoltaics (OPV) for retrofitting the interiors of windows in commercial buildings.• Founded a solar-power generating window tint company leveraging organic photovoltaic materials, making it to the final round of the 2010 University of Washington (UW) Foster Business School Business Plan Competition out of 92 teams. Managed a grant budget to build a functional prototype in the UW Material Science and Engineering Research Labs.• Performed extensive market research in building integrated photovoltaics (BIPV).• Developed understanding of financial statements, IP law, entrepreneurial processes.• Presented technical/engineering concepts to a large business audience.

Seattle, Wa, Us

My research with the Prof. C. Luscombe Conducting Polymers Research Group was concerned with researching an aspect of featured polymer printing/deposition for organic photovoltaic devices.• Lab Researcher: built polymer solar cells in Prof. C. Luscombe’s Organic Polymer Photovoltaic Research Group.• Developed novel ‘vapor stamping’ process for inexpensive sub-micron featuredorganosilane self assembled monolayer (SAM) growth on SiO2.• Analyzed data to characterize these materials collected with Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM).• Optimized micro-contact printing process of SAMs from spin-coated polymer stamps.• Ran columns, distillations, and other chemical purifications working with hydrophilic/hazardous chemicals in careful conditions.• Academic journal research.

• Managed the design, fundraising, and 10-student team responsible for a sustainablepotable water system in remote interior Suriname as the sole clean water sourcefor 300 villagers.• Coordinated with professional civil engineers abroad on a prroject to raise money for and then drill and install three wells, solving their local fresh water supply issue.

B.S. Materials Science & Engineering; Minor In Physics, Entrepreneurship, Renewable Energy, Polymer Solar Cells, Computer Science, Korean Language

Korean Language Institute