James Tyack Email and Phone Number

I lead the engineering team responsible for Coursera's Core Learner Experience which includes our Generative AI Coach solution aimed at delivering a personalized, supportive, and effective learning journey.Interested in Generative AI and our Learner Experience? Enroll in Andrew Ng's new course. Generative AI for Everyone https://blog.coursera.org/deeplearning-ai-and-coursera-launch-generative-ai-for-everyone-from-ai-pioneer-andrew-ng/

Leading empowered, distributed, data-infomed teams of engineers optimizing our web and mobile platforms for future and existing learners. We're passionate about our mission to transform lives through learning by providing in-demand career-based training and education.Led and implemented engineering wide systems for remote first and incident command during the COVID-19 pandemic supported by playbooks, success metrics and training.

We envision a world where anyone, anywhere can transform their life by accessing the world’s best learning experience.I lead growth acquisition and user identity. Our mission is to bring transformative education to more people around the world by optimizing our learner experience.

Led Growth Engineering at PagerDuty. Growth is a cross functional team of incredible engineers, analysts, marketers and data scientists running together to test rapid, innovative data driven experiments with a relentless focus on optimizing the customer experience at every touch point to increase growth in new users and deepen engagement.* Built a high performing team with a Growth Mindset culture fueling innovation, rapid experimentation and data/hypothesis-informed decision making.* Optimized trial on-boarding, in-app and checkout experience for new customers, driving self-service signups and activations.* Led platform technology improvements that resulted in improved integration with 3rd party experimentation/analytics tools and rapid experimentation.* Evangelized growth strategy and best practice across the business and in the wider engineering community.

Grew a distributed integrations team from 3 engineers to 12. The two teams built and shipped new strategic integrations that enable PagerDuty to work seamlessly with products from Slack, Zendesk, Atlassian, ServiceNow, Salesforce, AWS, and many other strategic third party systems. Effective, frictionless integrations are vital to PagerDuty's largest customers (and potential customers).Allowing customers to carry out incident management 'where they work' leads to fast resolution of incidents as well as driving rapid growth and high customer retention for the business.* Working closely with the engineering team, business, and product stakeholders to ensure we have clear vision and definition of the most valuable work. * Collaborating with business development and partner teams to ensure engineering is aligned with strategic direction. * Guiding architecture, feasibility, and estimation together with the engineering team.* Planning and tracking work and dependencies across internal teams and partners.* Fostering a data-driven approach to measuring the success of what we build and constantly improving.* Encouraging teamwork, ownership, career growth and leadership. 1:1s, OKRs, retrospectives, reviews.* Sourcing and hiring appropriate talent with a strong focus on diversity; both at the team and group level.

I manage the platform engineering team. We ingest, enrich, index and search billions of news stories, broadcast clips, blogs, tweets and more in real time to give our business customers immediate insights into the conversations, topics and stories they care about.- Building, leading and mentoring a talented team of data/search engineers that go above and beyond to drive high quality releases using weekly sprint cycles.- Managing the career of team members by encouraging growth and leadership via goal setting, continuous reviews and one-on-ones.- Setting vision and building a culture that attracts and retains enthusiastic, talented people and supports hiring; writing blog posts and networking in the tech community.- Actively involved in all stages of engineer recruitment and onboarding.- Removing distractions and ensuring commitment during sprints while empowering the team to be creative and innovative in their approach to solving problems.- Introducing, developing and championing professional best practice including continuous integration, coding standards/review, local containerized development/testing and streamlined, automated promotion to production.- Leading initiatives to optimize performance, refactor/simplify components and continuously improve platform resilience.- Simplifying and centralizing metrics / monitoring / dashboards to give at-a-glance assessment of application/team health and accurate early warning via alerts of problems 24x7 (Datadog, Loggly, Pagerduty).- Working closely with customer success, sales and product teams to ensure new features are clearly defined, problems quickly prioritized/addressed/communicated and customer expectations exceeded.- Rolling my sleeves up and diving into a complex domain and set of applications making use of Apache Storm, Kafka, JVM based microservices, Elasticsearch, DynamoDB etc. running on AWS/EC2 and written in Java/Scala/Python

- Leading and mentoring an agile/scrum team of exceptional individuals to build highly generic and flexible Master Data Management (MDM) products that accommodate structured and unstructured data feeds from many sources.- Contributing to and influencing platform architecture and libraries to ensure simplicity and reuse.- REST webservice design and development to support a modular approach to ETL, indexing, search, fuzzy match and linking requirements.- Performance tuning and scaling analysis to support challenging real-time big data processing and transactional performance targets.- Collaborating with product managers to define clear specifications that can be efficiently estimated, developed and tested.- Leading a series of technical 'lunch and learn sessions'​ that encourage innovation and personal development.- Designing and implementing initiatives that promote developer harmony, autonomy and common understanding of platform requirements and best practice using an intelligent approach to peer reviews.- Championing a high quality approach to iterative/agile development with solid automation for development, documentation, testing (unit and BDD), integration, containerization/deployment and release.- Promoting accessibility and diversity at group level innovation webinars by presenting my voluntary work in the community.Technology includes:- Elasticsearch (Elastic stack), Cassandra, Titan GraphDB, Storm, Hadoop/Yarn (CDH5), Kafka, Java 8 (Dropwizard, Spring, Maven), Github/Gitlab, Ruby, Docker/Docker Compose, JMeter, Grafana.

Leading the architecture, development and automation of a semantic web project. Strictly agile/XP methods during prototyping and development phases of a linked data repository. Technology includes RDF, SOLR, Sparql, MongoDB, Spring 3.0, Apache Wink (for REST client and server), Tomcat, Hadoop. Strict TDD with extensive use of mocking framework. Amazon Web Services: EC2, EBS, S3, RDS, RightScale, cross-region, batch-loading millions of documents. Championing fully automated unit and integration testing with continuous integration using Jenkins and fully integrated backlog, planning, iteration and defect tracking.

Lead engineer in strictly agile/XP team building new features using Spring Framework based JEE environment on two of Elsevier's flagship journal platforms: www.thelancet.com and www.cell.com. My work involved leading the transition of two teams from London to Philadelphia as well as driving the development and launch of an innovative scientific article rendering system known as 'Article of the Future'

Strictly agile/XP team. Using weekly iterations and close contact with internal business units, we have successfully developed and delivered two web-based information systems to support medical professionals and replace traditional paper based journals and books. Refactoring, TDD, continuous integration, pair programming. Use of Sping MVC/Webflow, JUnit, JMock 2, XHTML, Cobertura, Checkstyle, Freemarker, XSL, XPath, XQuery, Marklogic, Tomcat, WebSphere, Oracle.

J2EE environment for a company that provides solutions for large Cable TV and Broadband providers (including Comcast, UPC and Virgin Media). My role was on the UPC customer team maintaining and developing components for a large, complex provisioning system.

Nov 05 – Mar 06: Tester and developer working on a J2EE/Oracle system to track Network Rail structural assets. Jan 05- Oct 05: Analyst working on solutions to assist service delivery team for Metronet.

Maintained and extended part of a complex system written in Java that was designed to simulate performance of systems at the design stage using specially designed UML diagrams. I adapted quickly in an overseas working environment and enjoyed learning and practising German.- Name appeared on patent and paper for a performance prototyping system.