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James Pozdena

Louisville, COgithub.com/jpoz | linkedin.com/in/jpozdena

01Professional Summary

Staff+ engineer who has spent a career solving hard product and infrastructure problems at scale, from fintech backends at Simple and Coinbase to Airbnb's messaging platform. Strong systems thinker who designs architecture that holds up as scope grows: a growth-team notification service that became Coinbase's company-wide platform, and an architecture review process that raised design quality across teams. Currently applying that to AI agents in production, including a software factory where agents author 99% of a company's code changes and a customer success agent that cut complex investigations from hours to minutes.

02Core Skills

  • Languages: Go, TypeScript, Ruby, Python, Rust
  • Agents and AI: Applied AI / LLMs / LLMOps, agentic loops, harness and context engineering, human-in-the-loop workflows, agent frameworks, MCP, LLM evaluation and observability, agent memory, agent identity and permissioning, coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Pi)
  • Developer Tooling: CLIs, build systems and monorepos, CI/CD, per-PR preview environments, agent-driven code changes
  • Platform: Agent runtimes, autonomous workflows, SDK/API design, distributed systems, concurrency, microservices, REST APIs
  • Data and Infra: Temporal, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, Kata Containers, Kafka, DynamoDB, SQS, Redis, OpenTelemetry, Braintrust, Datadog, incident response
  • Leadership: Technical leadership, architecture review, design documentation, mentoring, cross-functional partnership with non-engineering teams

03Experience

Beacon Holdings

Member of Technical StaffMay 2026 - Present
  • Built a software factory that let agents author 99% of code changes for a portfolio company: agents picked up Linear tickets and opened PRs, validated in per-PR preview environments through CI and human review, and Datadog alerts triggered agent triage and, when needed, fix PRs.
  • Designing and building the Go infrastructure that runs agentic runtimes and autonomous multi-step workflows: runtime, sidecar agent, CLI tooling, and deploy configuration.
  • Run untrusted agent code in isolated Kata Containers microVMs on Kubernetes.
  • Designing the agent workspace: memory that carries across runs, plus agent identity and scoped permissions. Lead its design documents and technical design sessions.

AngelList

Software Engineer (Applied AI)Feb 2025 - May 2026
  • Built and operated production LLM agents for internal operations and customer-facing product, plus the agent platform other teams built on.
  • Built a customer success agent that ran deep investigations into complex investor questions, cutting investigation time from hours to minutes and reducing escalations to engineering; drafted answers went to the CS team for review.
  • Ran agent runs and long-running background jobs as durable Temporal workflows.
  • Built custom MCP servers and an MCP platform that brings third-party MCP servers into our cloud agent platform, with OAuth and per-user credentials and tool access.
  • Built eval suites and tracing for AI-generated investment insights for GPs; ran competing model and prompt setups side by side, had GPs pick favorites, and fed their preferences back into the evals until 9 of 10 GPs we tested with called it impactful.

Reviso

Co-FounderOct 2023 - Feb 2025
  • Co-founded an AI document platform and built its custom AI rich-text editor from zero, owning technical direction and hands-on development.

moonrepo (Y Combinator W23)

Co-Founder & CTOJan 2023 - Oct 2023
  • Built moonbase, the paid cloud caching and CI insights platform on top of moon, an open-source Rust build system and monorepo tool (4K+ GitHub stars).
  • Led product and engineering for the commercial platform as CTO, from cloud infrastructure to customer-facing developer experience.

Coinbase

Remote

Senior Staff Software Engineer, Growth FoundationsNov 2020 - Feb 2023
  • Led technical initiatives on the Growth team through high-performance backend services in TypeScript and Go.
  • Architected and launched the Growth Notification Service across multiple channels, apps, and organizations; it sent billions of messages in its first quarter, then became Coinbase's Global Notification Service as every team migrated onto it.
  • Initiated and led a Technical Architecture Review Process that raised design quality across teams.

Monarch Money

Principal Software EngineerApr 2020 - Nov 2020
  • Built and launched the v1 backend of the budgeting platform in Python.

Airbnb

Senior SWE → Engineering Manager → Staff SWEFeb 2016 - Mar 2020
  • Technical lead for the next-generation messaging inbox, migrating customer service traffic from email to in-app messaging and saving millions per year in service cost.
  • Managed and then led Service Excellence engineering, then returned to IC as Staff SWE on Guest Store messaging.

Simple Finance

Software Architect / Backend EngineerOct 2011 - Feb 2016
  • Led backend architecture and scaling from 100 to 100,000+ customers.