Curriculum Vitæ · 2024

James Chen

Full-stack engineer building infrastructure
at the scale of millions.
Email[email protected] LocationSan Francisco, CA GitHubgithub.com/jchen Webjameschen.engineering

Profile

Twelve years shipping systems that outlive their original authors. I care about the unglamorous layer — queues, migrations, deploy pipelines — because that's where the next 10× of engineer velocity is hiding. Most recently led platform at Shopify; previously built core payments primitives at Stripe.

Experience

01
Staff Engineer, Platform Lead
2020 — Present
Shopify · San Francisco
  • Lead a 14-engineer platform team powering the merchant stack for 50M+ businesses across 175 countries.
  • Architected the multi-region deploy system cutting release times from 45 minutes to under 6 minutes.
  • Drove a Rails monolith decomposition that shaved p99 checkout latency by 38% during BFCM peak.
  • Author of the internal design doc practice now used by all engineering ICs company-wide.
02
Senior Software Engineer
2016 — 2020
Stripe · Payments Infrastructure
  • Built the idempotency and retry layer processing $400B+ in annual transaction volume.
  • Co-designed the routing engine that intelligently directs payments across 30+ acquiring partners.
  • Shipped the ledger double-entry migration with zero downtime and zero reconciliation errors.
  • Mentored six engineers through promotion; three became tech leads on adjacent teams.
03
Software Engineer
2012 — 2016
Palantir Technologies · Forward Deployed
  • Deployed data integration pipelines for three Fortune 100 clients across finance and aerospace.
  • Built a query optimizer extension adopted across the Foundry product for complex joins.