Jim Hughes Email & Phone Number

Boulder, Co, Us

Founder advisor specializing in product strategy, software architecture, engineering management, general operations and technical talent development.

Mountain View, Ca, Us

Overall technical lead for Drive edge infrastructure: the file viewer, the Drive API, distributed synchronization and caching (including Drive for Desktop), data ingress/egress, routing and traffic shaping, workflow orchestration, video and file processing pipelines, as well as Pubsub/Webhook/Email/SMS/Push/Chat notifications...all serving millions of requests + terabytes of data per second.Working to make Google Workspace a platform you can trust and bring AI-powered workplace productivity to the world.

Mountain View, Ca, Us

One of the engineering leads for the foundational storage systems that hold all of Google's data, (blob, object, file, key, and configuration storage) in addition to distributed system primitives used by all products and services at Google (locking, leader election, time). Managed 4 teams (~30 software engineers) responsible for production reliability, service quality, development velocity, engineering excellence, and distributed systems analysis.‣ Increased release velocity 2x and reduced KTLO overhead by 25% across 19 distinct development teams, driving a 10% increase in developer satisfaction 3 years in row.‣ Enhanced and hardened Google's key management infrastructure to be resilient to global failures, time bombs, and accidental crypto-shredding.‣ Delivered multi-year storage infrastructure projects including platform tech behind BigQuery Omni (multi-cloud data analytics) and new economies of scale: achieving a 2-5x increase in footprint within a single cell.‣ Designed and led GCP engineering excellence program that improved on-time delivery and SLO compliance rates by 20-30% across an organization of >20k engineers: introducing strong statistical process controls (weekly business reviews), a novel build-test-release platform, and updating the company-wide SWE job ladder to directly incentivize code/test health, operational rigor, and long-term investments in system architecture.

Chicago, Il, Us

Reporting directly to the executive team, owned all software development and led the company's transformation from a consulting firm into a product company. In addition to general management, responsible for architecture, design, and engineering for all aspects of Verve's core products: an IT/OT asset management system, a security information and event management (SIEM) solution, and a configuration management tool for industrial control/IoT/networking gear.‣ Scaled core platform to support thousands of customers, millions of assets under managements, and ~400k requests per second by migrating from an ASP.NET monolith to C# microservices on a Kafka event bus and an Angular front-end.‣ Implemented low-level network protocols in Python to allow Ansible to communicate with and manage industrial devices (Common Industrial Protocol, Modbus, BACnet, S7comm).‣ Grew the software engineering team to a self-sufficient division of 30+ in this time period...designing our career ladder, recruitment, and hiring process. Set up organizational structure, rhythms of business, and performance management system.‣ Increased developer productivity 4x (as measured by mean-time-to-completion, release cadence, and code quality/reliability measures) through the implementation of OKRs, agile sprinting/scrum process, and an in-house training program. Directly mentored and developed first-time engineering managers and staff engineers with a combination of 1-on-1 and group mentoring.

Chicago, Il, Us

New York, Ny, Us

Platform software developer responsible for providing technical oversight and driving strategic projects across an organization of 800 software and site reliability engineers. Led interdisciplinary working groups ("v-teams") of up to 40 people tackling cross-team projects in areas such as source control, CI/CD, service infrastructure, market simulators, knowledge graphs, and distributed file/blob/columnar storage systems.‣ Uncovered a troubling reliability trend and then led an initiative to incentivize testing and operational excellence. Created a permanent company-wide QA team; built and operated a Jenkins and Kubernetes-based CI/CD platform; trained forward-deployed SDET's that would help line-level teams get the most out of the platform, and fostered a bottom-up shift in company culture towards quality-driven delivery through tech talks, training, and new language built into the career ladder.‣ Enabled developers to work remotely using laptops ("secure access workstations") by implementing hardware-rooted security controls: for the first time ever, everyone in the company had a way to work on the codebase away from their desktops, anywhere in the world, online or off without exposing highly sensitive assets and source code to physical attack vectors.‣ Tools and infrastructure lead for all Python, JavaScript, and Front-End development. Standardized and augmented developer tools (compiler toolchain, testing frameworks, linters, 3rd party libraries), improving developer productivity and shutting down multiple shadow-IT operations.‣ Lead instructor and curriculum designer for new hire training encompassing development processes, code style, architecture, reliability engineering, quality assurance, security, and technical writing. Developed an engineering management mentoring program targeting line-level managers with the goal of improving growth outcomes for individual contributors via improved manager engagement and high-quality coaching.

Redmond, Washington, Us

Led a team of 3, designing and implementing a distributed diagnostic utility for triaging failures in Hyper-V virtualization fabrics...automatically collecting traces from thousands of servers, using rule-based heuristics and an expert system to root cause issues (hardware, firmware, OS, configuration, ACLs, networking), and producing human-friendly remediation steps for sysadmins to repair faults at deployment time and during active incidents.Served as the public face of the development team: presented at conferences like Ignite to audiences of hundreds, interfaced with OEM's to test and certify new hardware with Shielded VMs, ran on-site customer engagements with public agencies ranging from HHS to DoD, and conducted press briefings in preparation for the release of Windows Server 2016 https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/10/hands-on-with-windows-server-2016-the-os-with-its-foot-in-everything/

Redmond, Washington, Us

Individual contributor working on Hyper-V and the Windows kernel as part of the shielded VM project: a new capability in Windows Server 2016 to host virtual machines isolated from the underlying hypervisor and platform administrator using hardware-rooted (HSM, TCG) security https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/security/guarded-fabric-shielded-vm/guarded-fabric-and-shielded-vmsBuilt the Host Guardian Service: a highly-available enterprise service for attesting the health of host systems and managing secure key release over the network. Led performance optimization and scaling efforts to meet the demands of the entire Azure cloud, resulting in a 92% reduction in tail latency.

Madison, Wisconsin, Us

Took application development practice started at UW-Madison and expanded to providing all 26 UW campuses with centralized development services and a platform-as-a-service solution for hosting line of business applications. As chief architect, partnered with the system president and CIO to define technical strategy and drive projects to consolidate duplicative campus-level infrastructure into the centralized platform.‣ Initiated UW's migration to the public cloud: preparing a business case, securing executive sponsorship, aligning IT teams across instiutions, negotiating contracts with AWS, navigating complex regulatory and legal challenges associated with GovCloud in addition to FISMA/FERPA/HIPAA. Created design guidelines, policies, and review processes for governing cloud architecture at scale, managing costs, and creating safe/reliable/secure IT infrastructure. Designed network topology, routing & firewall rules, and CI/CD infrastructure to enable progressive migration through hybrid cloud/on-prem deployment.‣ Administered a geographically disparate, fault-tolerant application hosting platform running on a hybrid cloud spanning bare-metal and AWS. Designed a complete GitOps infrastructure management and automation solution using Chef, Fluentd, Sensu, Python, CloudFormation, Elasticsearch, HAProxy, Memcached, Git, Jenkins, and Atlassian Crowd.‣ Led a cross-functional team of developers, designers, support staff, and university relations specialists managing state and public relations. Amplified the impact and reach of university communications teams through strong technology and tooling support, including a comprehensive content management system with hundreds of daily active users and publishing websites receiving ~1 million hits/wk in aggregate.

Madison, Wi, Us

Grew database administration services to a standalone department providing full-service web and application development. Design, architecture, and implementation in a range of tech stacks including LAMP, Ruby-on-Rails, Node.JS (MEAN), C# ASP.NET, and Java (Spring). Led all customer engagements including design sprints, requirements gathering, and contract negotiation.‣ Improved profit margins and delivery speed by building a multi-tenant content management system that can be reused across projects ranging from public-facing websites, internal tools, and CRUD-style web applications.‣ Drove application reliability through exhaustive end-to-end testing with Selenium, and deploying a CI/CD platform including a test cluster on top of Docker, ESXi, and a fleet of physical Android/iOS test devices.‣ Trained junior engineers in project management, software engineering, and database administration...creating instructor-led courses and independent study tutorials as part of a holistic professional development program. Productized internal training curriculum into a "developer academy" for campus partners.

Madison, Wi, Us

Noticing signfigant demand and a gap in DoIT's service catalog, transitioned to a role providing dedicated consultation to academic departments on their data ingestion, storage, analytics, and modeling needs.‣ Created end-to-end data pipelines, schemas, and storage backends for both internal operations and published research in various domains: book publishing, lab animal care, university admissions, geology, economics, and research administration.‣ Modernized development process by deploying agile processes and supporting infrastructure (Jira, Confluence, Git).‣ Administered CentOS, Red Hat, Windows, and OS X servers as well as database systems including MySQL, MSSQL, PostgreSQL, Apache Solr, CouchDB, MS Access, and FileMaker.

Madison, Wi, Us

Mutlifaceted role in UW-Madison's Division of Information Technology supporting 5000+ users, completing a range of responsibilities including help desk, hardware repair, endpoint management, active directory administration, automated server and desktop provisioning, backup/disaster recoverty, information systems architecture, and SAN deployment. ‣ Automated endpoint provisioning using MDT, Windows Deployment Services, Group Policy, SCCM, BigFix, PowerShell, AutoIT, Batch, and Bash.‣ Improved efficiency of departmental operations by developing line of business web applications including mobile case management, hardware rentals, and repair logistics.

Transitioned into a broader role with responsibility for all technical operations and software engineering across all product lines/games. Led significant modernization efforts including:‣ Made data loss a thing of the past by rebuilding active-passive game state storage backend to use 2-phase commit and write ahead logging.‣ Redesigned and standardized netcode used across game properties to a rollback-based protocol that reduced mean latency from 90->40ms.‣ Implemented comprehensive lean/agile development process including SVN and later Git version control, continuous integration, and project management suite.‣ Replaced in-game support tools with a custom CRM suite that allowed staff to manage players, events, and support requests from any device...reducing support costs and incidents of game master corruption while improving responsiveness, quality of support outcomes, and customer satisfaction rate.

Strategy, growth product management, creative direction, and general management for a game studio producing a free-fork of Ultima Online, the defining MMORPG made by Origin Systems/EA Games.Grew the studio from 3 to 30 employees in a range of functions: customer support, art, story & level design, development, and IT.During this time, increased monthly active player count by 86% YoY through the introduction of new player-vs-player (PVP) game modes, player-vs-monster (PVM) encounters, and additional play styles (new crafting systems, thievery). Drove player retention through multi-year, multimedia storylines (occurring in-game, book, video, and forums) that changed/reacted to player choices in realtime.Doubled and diversified revenue streams by building partnerships with online game studios in other genres, cross-merchandising/ad placement, and the introduction of in-game microtransactions for cosmetic items and time-saving boosters.