Staff Engineer, High-Scale Infrastructure

James Willingham is a Senior/Staff Engineer with over 10 years of experience in building and scaling B2B SaaS platforms, with a recent focus at Pendo and Cisco. He specializes in taking products from inception to scale, particularly data-heavy systems handling millions of real-time events. His expertise includes high-scale infrastructure with deep experience in PostgreSQL optimization, high-concurrency backends (FastAPI/Java), and resilient sync engines for MDM and analytics. He is also an expert in frontend craftsmanship using the React/Next.js ecosystem, creating polished, high-performance interfaces for complex data workflows. Currently, he is building custom LLM agents (Claude 3.5/GPT-4o) to automate enterprise tasks like schema migrations and data mapping. Additionally, he possesses native-level proficiency in Chinese, which is valuable for bridge roles and international data coordination. He is seeking a high-agency Staff/Senior/Founding Engineer role at a product-led company where he can own core architecture and ship fast. He is located in Chapel Hill, NC, works remotely only, and is not willing to relocate.