James Kirkpatrick

Hi, I’m James. I’m an Olympian and full stack developer with 7+ years of experience building complex web applications. Alongside coding, I’m at my best spending time in the following areas:

  • Dev team culture: building teams that collaborate, support each other, and learn together
  • Driving quality by championing engineering best practices like code review processes and automation
  • Problem-solving at a product level, making sure we’re building the right thing for the right problem
  • Mentoring junior engineers

Outside of work, my interests include trail running with my dog, pulling the perfect espresso shot, and tinkering on open source software. An open source contribution I’m proud of is updating the secrets management tool Teller to

add support for storing secrets in the Cloudflare Workers KV store.

My recent stack includes:

languages

  • JavaScript
  • TypeScript
  • Golang
  • Python
  • SQL

frameworks & tools

  • Fastify
  • Docker
  • React
  • Kubernetes
  • Terraform

platforms

  • AWS
  • Microsoft Azure
  • Cloudflare
  • Google Cloud Platform

Experience

Electronic Arts

Associate Technical Director

remote

May 2023 - present

  • Responsible for directing engineering teams across multiple internal tools used by game team artists
  • Developing and implementing product and technical roadmaps
  • Mentoring 3 engineers from a technical and personal perspective to aid their growth
  • Spearheaded the rollout of a new code review process within our team, resulting in decreased bugs, higher quality commits, and increased team collaboration
  • Collecting and analyzing telemetry to make data driven product decisions
  • Ensure seamless collaboration across various aspects of product teams (design, frontend, backend, devops, artists, and stakeholders)
  • Interviewing and assessing engineering and PM candidates in the hiring process

Electronic Arts

Software Engineer III

remote

May 2022 - May 2023

  • Full-Stack application architecture and implementation
  • Establish development best practices and processes to ensure high quality software
  • Collaborate with Product and Project Management teams to scope tasks plan project milestones, and develop roadmaps

Autotelic Development

Lead Fullstack Developer

Sept 2017 - May 2022

  • Automated Cloud infrastructure provisioning and deployments
  • Full-Stack application design and implementation
  • Design and implementation of the secure storage, management and usage of application secrets
  • Platform team support with development of tools and processes to improve developer experience
  • Manage day-to-day tasks of developers, offering feedback and mentorship to develop their skillsets
  • Direct client interface with stakeholders and external teams throughout project durations
  • Hire and help grow the team from 2 to 15 developers by conducting interviews and technical assessment for all engineering hires
  • Collaborate with Product and Project Management teams to scope tasks and develop roadmaps

Goat Creative

Fullstack Developer

Oct 2016 - Sept 2017

    Education

    Lighthouse Labs

    Web Development Bootcamp

    June 2016 - Aug 2016

    University of Victoria

    B.SC - Honours (Chemistry)

    2009 - 2013

    Accomplishments

    Team Canada

    Athlete

    2013 - present

    Represented Canada in international Field Hockey competitions including Olympic Games, Commonwealth Games, Pan Am Games, and World Cup.