Shakir James, PhD

Owned the AWS customer frontend journey, from account creation and management to multi-account organizations, serving 1M+ weekly users, 4M+ new customers annually, and contributing to $1.2B+ in revenue.

• Converted 42 recurring engineering processes (design reviews, status reporting, postmortem analysis, and executive communication) into GenAl workflows, cutting workflow cycle time from days to hours. Scaled GenAl adoption through workshops to 102 employees across 5 organizations (90% satisfaction), spawning a 127-member GenAl community of practice.
• Drove 3 years of cross-organizational alignment to unify a fragmented console experience across two major AWS product areas, authoring the founding product vision document. 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.
• Oversaw delivery of the redesigned AWS sign-up experience, eliminating an 8-year free tier billing problem for 4M+ new customers annually, recognized by industry analysts as AWS's most comprehensive cross-service collaboration to date.
• 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 the organization from the ground up to 35 engineers in Toronto, Seattle, and Arlington, with two managers and six senior engineers. Recognized as Top 4 Bar Raiser for conducting 28 loops in 2022, with 200+ total interviews across tenure.

Owned the platform supporting $300M in annual revenue across the ticket resale market, serving 500+ marketplaces.

• 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).
• Grew the engineering organization from 2 to 30 engineers and one manager across four countries: Poland, Virginia, Argentina, and Ukraine.
• Compressed the release cycle from weeks to hours by implementing a CI/CD automation framework.

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

Pioneered the technical foundation as a founding engineer at a startup, contributing to a 2017 acquisition.

• Ph.D. in Computer Engineering, December 2012. GPA: 3.6
• M.S. in Computer Engineering, May 2009. GPA: 3.6

• GPA: 3.9 - President's Medal of Excellence (highest GPA in college)