Shakir James, PhD

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Employment

Software Development Manager, Amazon Web Services (AWS) Dec 2020–Present

Grew organization from 0 to 35 engineers across three offices (Toronto, Seattle, Arlington) — including two managers and six senior engineers — serving 1M+ weekly users and 4M+ new customers annually.

  • Converted 42 recurring engineering processes — design reviews, status reporting, postmortem analysis, and executive communication — into GenAI workflows, cutting document cycle time from days to hours. Scaled adoption through workshops to 102 employees across 5 organizations (90% satisfaction), spawning a 127-member GenAI community of practice.
  • Drove 3 years of cross-organizational alignment to unify a fragmented console experience across two major AWS product areas — strategy approved and launch underway in 2026.
  • Cut UI delivery lead time 50% (6 to 3 weeks) and doubled flow efficiency (17% to 33%) by creating the End-to-End Builder mechanism, enabling service teams to own features from backend to frontend. Drove 14 ownership transfers across 6 teams to full independence.
  • Pioneered the first production micro-frontend in collaboration with the Console Platform team, establishing an architectural pattern later adopted by 500+ micro-frontends across 100+ console teams.
  • Built a high-performing engineering team from zero to 13 engineers in 14 months through a structured external sourcing mechanism.
Chief Technology Officer, DTI Management & 1Ticket.com July 2017–Dec 2020

Led four distributed teams across four countries (Poland, Virginia, Argentina, Ukraine) — scaling from 2 to 30 engineers and one manager.

  • Scaled processing throughput 100x (2,000 to 200,000 tickets/hour) by pioneering serverless microservice architecture on AWS — reducing infrastructure costs 7.4x with 0% downtime during migration. Architecture featured in AWS Startups Blog (Feb 2020).
  • Drove 4x revenue growth by reducing duplicate sales 5x across key marketplaces.
  • Compressed the release cycle from weeks to hours by implementing a CI/CD automation framework.
  • Restructured engineering into autonomous small-team crews, scaling headcount from 2 to 30 across four countries while maintaining delivery velocity.
Assistant Professor, University of the District of Columbia Aug 2014–Aug 2018

Taught graduate-level courses in cloud computing (EC2, S3, DynamoDB, Hadoop, EMR), network security and cryptography, and advanced web development.

Senior R&D Engineer, Observable Networks Nov 2012–July 2014

Founding engineer at early-stage startup; contributed technical foundation leading to 2017 acquisition.

  • Reduced query execution time 190x by designing fast, scalable in-memory data structures for big data analysis.
Research Assistant, Washington University in St. Louis Aug 2006–Nov 2012

Built a peer-to-peer app and protocol that reduced costly traffic and distribution time by 40 and 41 times respectively.

Education

Ph.D. & M.S., Computer Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis Aug 2006–Dec 2012
  • Ph.D. in Computer Engineering, December 2012. GPA: 3.6
  • M.S. in Computer Engineering, May 2009. GPA: 3.6
B.S., Computer Science & Mathematics (Double Major), Midwestern State University Aug 2002–May 2005
  • GPA: 3.9 — President’s Medal of Excellence (highest GPA in college)

Technical Experience & Projects

  • Open-source (2019). Contributed to AWS SAM and AWS CloudFormation .
  • Full-Stack Serverless Framework (2019). Serverless API framework enabling full-stack local development without cloud dependency. (Python, LocalStack)

Additional Experience and Awards

  • Top 4 Bar Raiser, AWS Identity (VP Org) (2022): 28 BR interview loops in 2022; ranked 4th across the VP org.
  • Chancellor’s Fellow (2006–2011): Awarded a competitive five-year fellowship to complete Ph.D.
  • Publications (2007–2013): Wrote and published ten research papers.