James Thigpen Email & Phone Number

Billings, Mt, Us

Fractional CTO/Engineering LeadershipData Infrastructure BuildoutOrganizational Development & Business Process MaturationConsultation on Business Metrics

Boston, Massachusetts, Us

During my time here, my responsibilities have grown beyond the Product and Engineering teams with our Talent Matching and Customer Success coming under my organizational umbrella. This expanded role has allowed the delivery of end-to-end solutions across the organization by allowing tighter connections between Product and Talent Matching and also eased an organization wide rollout of a quarterly OKR process and Annual Planning process. Reporting directly to the CEO and with the majority of the company's functions under my purview, I played a key role in driving towards Clora's ambitious vision in the competitive biotech talent marketplace.On the product engineering side, we have invested deeply in our processes and technology driving towards a culture of continuous improvement, customer-problem focus, and rapid iteration in pursuit of Clora’s open marketplace for biotech consultant talent.I also championed and implented a modern data infrastructure, leveraging tools such as DBT, Dagster, Snowflake, Mode Analytics, and Hightouch. This has empowered data-driven decision-making and actionable insights throughout the organization and now drives revenue reporting. A key part of this strategy has been training one of our talented operations employees in these technologies who now leads this function.

San Jose, California, Us

Took over leadership of the Product Engineering team after Covid-related layoffs drove the loss of the entire product engineering management layer. Guided the team through that difficult time and the follow-on attrition across the entire company.Drove increased predictability and observability within the teams by driving an agile adoption process over roughly a year in a team with very little agile experience. Worked closely with Product to establish a healthier Product/Engineering relationship and to better formalize associated processes. Worked with HR to establish a hiring process for engineers and engineering managers and began growing the team again, doubling the size of the team and hiring an engineering manager. Leveraged the above to deliver 3 large feature releases with significant customer value attached in terms of contract size, user experience, and product capabilities.Guided the team through a drastic cultural shift towards more collaboration, pairing, emphasis on testing, and other basic engineering hygiene practices. Advocated for work identified by engineering to control and reduce AWS costs resulting in a 30% reduction in annual spend against forecast.Collaborated closely during the establishment of a new customer support team, development of a reliability maturity model for customer evaluation and guidance, creation of a dedicated recruiting team, roll out of a annual employee review process, and other initiatives which impacted the entire organization.

Seattle, Washington, Us

Lead the engineering teams responsible for our international expansion, SRE, and payments meeting an aggressive deadline for platform integration during a merger with DogBuddy in the EU. Drove roadmaps across IT, Infrastructure, Data, ML Platform, SRE, International, and Global Payments aligned with Leadership’s strategies emphasizing long term cost reduction, efficiency, and accelerating engineering project timelines.Grew Managers, Sr. Managers, and Directors. Organized an ongoing management training program. Hosted workshops on topics such as effective written communication, project organization, and stress management.Extended the OKR process utilized in my group to all of engineering and supported the Chief of Staff in the rollout of OKRs across the entire company.Responsible for yearly budget with an organization of ~50 at its peak.Oversaw migration of our traditional EC2 instanced based infrastructure into Kubernetes and the initial stages of our move from batch data pipelines into a streaming data infrastructure.Lead the team through significant layoffs due to Covid-19.

Seattle, Washington, Us

Grew and split the team to be more focused while minimizing redundancies in work or process. Drove annual budgeting and planning for Engineering. Lead an AWS region move from NorCal to Oregon with minimal downtime. Lead the teams through the acquisition of our largest US competitor, DogVacay through platform integration.Took ownership of IT moving from a simple Helpdesk style department to enabling deeper and more centralized support of corporate applications.Proposed and created a team to develop a machine learning/analytics platform for our Data Science group significantly reducing the time to deployment for analytical models.Drove the adoption of OKRs and Roadmapping as cohesive repeatable business rhythms. Was one of the first groups to formalize these processes and they were adopted by many teams across the organization.

Seattle, Washington, Us

Scope expanded from cloud infrastructure team to include all data infrastructure. Worked with consultants to implement a clickstream-based data collection system, to stand up a data warehouse, and to consolidate data pipelines and eliminate data silos while growing the team.

Seattle, Washington, Us

Designed and implemented a robust production deployment system and AWS infrastructure which removed single points of failure and transitioned the company from a “single server” model to a modern resilient cloud infrastructure. Implemented instance configuration management for all systems, Infrastructure as Code, and robust monitoring, logging, and reporting.

Brooklyn, New York, Us

Worked to help build and lead a team of talented engineers delivering humor content (and lots of cat pictures) to end users at high traffic volumes.

Brooklyn, New York, Us

Miami, Fl, Us

Dev Lead on a team working on Kaseya Network Discovery, a distributed message-based IT networking application written in .NET and a variety of open source tools.

A software consulting and service firm specializing in .NET applications. Extensive experience building and delivering applications built on NHibernate, Castle Project, Rhino Service Bus, and MVC frameworks.

Worked as dev lead on a team of 3 .NET developers in the maintenance and rewrite of a mobile client-server inventory solution targeted towards municipalities using Infor Hansen.

Houston, Tx, Us

Worked in the Quantitative Imaging Laboratory in the Computer Science Department at the University of Houston. Our lab focused on quantitative imaging research primarily in the biomedical domain.

Worked on a project involving spectral imaging in pursuit of novel means of performing medically diagnostic procedures.

Ms, Computer Science

Bs, Computer Science