hi, i'm james

staff engineer for hire

I’ve been a founding engineer, as well as infrastructure and security lead, for multiple AI and ML startups. I work directly with ML teams, AI researchers, and academic scientists to accelerate their development and get their work deployed to users.

My next role will focus on strategic technical work at a fast-moving and engineering-centric company. I’m particularly interested in cutting edge work in distributed systems, local-first software, cryptography and privacy engineering, and AI/LLM safety and security.

If that describes your company, I’d love to talk.

Located in Boston, often in NYC. Open to remote and hybrid roles.

Skills

I have over a decade of experience building and scaling startups in regulated industries such as finance, law, and human subjects research. I specialize in accelerating ML and AI development within the scientific Python ecosystem.

My recent roles have focused on architectural and strategic work at organization scale. Representative projects include establishing Terraform patterns at a large financial services provider, creating a SOC 2 compliance program for an LLM legaltech startup, and designing a multi-team Bazel migration at a robotics research organization.

These projects have spanned multiple quarters and involved tool selection, architectural decisionmaking, drafting cross-team roadmaps, and even hiring key team members. I have scaled out my own contributions by building relationships across teams, setting standards and policies, and educating peers on industry best practices.

Working at scale is efficient, but I also have hands-on experience at seed stage startups where success depends on performing as a “team of one”. When executing independently, I am a fast and effective individual contributor with over twenty years of experience writing code (primarily in Python).

Outside of my day job, I aim to contribute to the tech community through continuing education. I’ve been a conference organizer for DevOpsDays, a conference speaker, and even an occasional podcast guest. I’ve also worked with O’Reilly to teach an infrastructure-as-code course and author a book chapter in Seeking SRE.

Areas of technical experience include:
  • Python
  • On-Call / SRE
  • LLM and ML Training
  • Bazel
  • Amazon Web Services
  • Google Cloud Platform
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • Terraform
  • SOC 2

Startups

Robotics and AI Institute
Reinforcement Learning Kubernetes Python Bazel GCP LLMs Terraform
Robotics and AI Institute
The RAI Institute unites top talent to develop technology that will increase productivity, contribute to human safety, care for people with disabilities, and help people live their lives more fully.
Tome
LLMs Python AWS Terraform
Tome

acquired by AngelList

Tome uses artificial intelligence to decode contracts into language humans can understand. We level the playing field between those who have the time and resources for legal support and those who don’t.

Catchlight
AWS Terraform Snowflake
Catchlight
Catchlight helps financial advisors save time and grow their firms by predicting which leads are most likely to convert.
Quantopian
Python AWS Ansible
Quantopian

acquired by Robinhood

Quantopian provides free education, data, and tools so anyone can pursue quantitative finance. Select members license their algorithms and share in the profits.

Contact

My primary focus is finding a full-time role aligned with my technical interests. I prefer early stage startups, but will also consider more autonomous or experimental teams within established companies.

The best way to reach me is:

admin@jmeickle.com