Senior AI Infrastructure & Systems Engineer

James Willingham is a Senior Full-Stack and Systems Engineer specializing in "mechanical sympathy"—building high-performance AI infrastructure and real-time distributed systems. He recently served as a Lead Engineer at Pendo, where he architected agentic workflows and RAG pipelines, improving user task completion by 40% for over 100k users. Before Pendo, he engineered Go-based microservices at Cisco for real-time telemetry from millions of global devices. He excels at 0→1 product build-outs and low-level system optimization, identifying as an AI-native developer focused on transitioning AI from static prompts to autonomous operators in complex data environments. He is seeking Staff IC or Founding Engineer roles at engineering-led startups or high-scale infra teams, specifically U.S.-based positions with a legal entity for 1099 or W2.