Shakir James, Ph.D.

Owned the AWS customer 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.

• 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.
• Led four-year migration of the Accounts core data tier from shared MySQL to team-owned DynamoDB tables across AWS Top Secret and Secret classified partitions, eliminating shared-database dependency for 97% of daily API traffic (184K of 189K calls), cutting average latency 73% (22ms to 6ms), bringing 28 APIs to parity with commercial, and eliminating 20+ annual outages with zero customer impact during cutover.
• Recovered a stalled OS migration in the same partition that the org had granted a one-year VP extension on, shipping all 196 hosts from Amazon Linux 2012 to AL2 in two months, cutting average JVM heap utilization from 41% to 25%, and migrating log infrastructure to CloudWatch to drop incident log-diving time from over a day to two hours.
• Converted 42 recurring engineering processes (design reviews, status reporting, postmortem analysis, and executive communication) into GenAI workflows using multi-agent orchestration (LangChain), cutting workflow cycle time from days to hours. Scaled GenAI adoption through workshops to 102 employees across 5 organizations (90% satisfaction), spawning a 127-member GenAI community of practice.
• 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.
• Drove the cross-team partnership with Console Platform to deliver AWS's first production micro-frontend, establishing the architectural pattern adopted by 500+ micro-frontends across 100+ console teams.
• Built the first AWS deployment pipeline gated by canaries running on downstream consumer teams, taking a shared component used by IAM Identity Center, Directory Service, Trusted Advisor, and Organizations from manual monthly 4-hour deployments to fully automated continuous delivery with cross-console rollback, catching a production regression during rollout that would have shipped under the legacy process.
• 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.
• Formed a team to unify AWS's fragmented cloud governance UI across four security and compliance services. Delivered the first consistent controls experience, adopted across five consoles.
• Built a high-performing engineering team from zero to 13 engineers in 14 months through a structured external sourcing mechanism.
• Ranked Top 4 Bar Raiser in the AWS Identity VP org in 2022, completing 28 interview loops in 2022; 200+ across AWS tenure - driving hiring quality at scale.

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

• Pioneered serverless microservice architecture on AWS, migrating a monolith to Lambda and API Gateway, scaling throughput 100x (2,000 to 200,000 tickets/hour), reducing infrastructure costs 7.4x, with 0% downtime during migration. Architecture featured in AWS Startups Blog (Feb 2020).
• Ran the legacy monolith and the new distributed system in parallel for months, migrating brokers in small batches with broker-level rollback — the old system stayed alive as the safety net while the new one earned trust.
• Grew the engineering organization from 2 to 30 engineers and one manager across four countries (United States, Poland, Argentina, and Ukraine), restructuring into autonomous small-team crews while maintaining delivery velocity.
• Compressed the release cycle from weeks to hours by implementing a CI/CD automation framework.
• Contributed to AWS CloudFormation and the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) open-source projects.
• Built the Full-Stack Serverless Framework, enabling full-stack local development without cloud dependency. (Python, LocalStack).

Built an online platform for small newspapers to increase online revenue by sharing content.

Designed and launched UDC's first cloud computing course (CSCI 398: Scalable Cloud Computing) covering Hadoop, Spark, MapReduce, and AWS (EC2, EMR, S3, DynamoDB), and UDC's first cloud security course (CSCI 558: Security in Cloud Computing) covering cryptographic algorithms, protocols, and cloud security architecture. Introduced online course delivery to the CS department, expanding access for working students.

Founding engineer at a network security startup acquired by Cisco in 2017, designing the core anomaly detection engine for suspicious device behavior across millions of endpoints in near real-time.

• Built a two-tier detection architecture: a bloom filter in ElastiCache answering "has this device ever connected to this destination before?" on the fast path, with Redshift flow logs as the source of truth for reconciliation. Reduced query execution time 270x (180 min to 40 sec).
• Stack: Python, SQLAlchemy, Celery, ElastiCache, Redshift.

• Ph.D. Thesis (2009–2012): "Network Efficiency in Peer-to-peer Data Distribution" — five years of experimental research demonstrating that centralized architectures fail to scale for high-volume content distribution.
• Teaching Assistant (2009–2012): Lectured in graduate and undergraduate courses in computer architecture and system software.
• Research Assistant / Associate: Built a peer-to-peer content distribution protocol that reduced costly Internet traffic 40x and data distribution time 41x compared to Twitter's alternative, demonstrated experimentally across hundreds of data-center machines. Designed, implemented, and evaluated a P2P network architecture — including a network device and application server. Developed an API for adding functionality to a programmable router, including core plugins for forwarding, counting, and filtering packets.

Developed novel methods and tools for IO-performance analysis of enterprise applications.

• Programmer, New Media Gateway (2005–2006)
• Developer Intern, Sheppard Air Force Base (2002–2004)
• Teacher, Dominica Grammar School, Dominica, West Indies (2002)

• Ph.D. Computer Engineering, Washington University, St. Louis, MO. December 2012. GPA: 3.6
• M.S. Computer Engineering, Washington University, St. Louis, MO. May 2009. GPA: 3.6
• B.S. Computer Science and Mathematics, Midwestern State University, Wichita Falls, TX. May 2005. GPA: 3.9 - President's Medal of Excellence (highest GPA in college)

• Top 4 Bar Raiser, AWS Identity VP Org (2022): 28 BR interview loops in 2022; ranked 4th across the VP org and 200 total interviews across AWS tenure.(2022)
• Goodie Drawer Award (for timely and relevant analyses), Intel (2008)
• Chancellor's Graduate Fellowship, Washington University in St. Louis. Awarded a competitive five-year fellowship to complete Ph.D. (2006)
• Problem Solver Award, New Media Gateway Inc. (2005, 2006)
• President's Medal, Midwestern State University (for highest GPA in the college of Math and Science.) (2005)

• CTO Roundtable of Washington DC (2020–Present)
• DC CTO Club (2019–Present)
• Food Packer, Feed My Starving Children (2020)
• Founding Member, Diversity and inclusion Group, DC CTO Club (2020)
• Various committee chairs and memberships at UDC (2014–2017)
• Speaker and Panelist at numerous conferences including ATARC, NSBE, WashU, RIT.

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (2017)
• AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate (2017)
• AWS Certified Developer - Associate (2017)
• MITx 15.390.1x, Entrepreneurship 101: Who is your customer? (2016)

• Shakir James and Jason Knieriem. 1Ticket Leadership on Scalability. Automation, and Enabling the Flip Economy . In AWS Startups Blog, Feb 2020.
• Shakir James and Patrick Crowley. Experimental Analyses of Data Distribution on Data Center Networks . In Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE Thirteenth International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P), Trento, Italy, Sep 2013 (19% acceptance rate, 18/94).
• Shakir James. Network Efficiency in Peer-to-peer Data Distribution. Washington University in St. Louis, Ph.D. Dissertation, 2012.
• Shakir James and Patrick Crowley. IMP: ISP-Managed P2P . In Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P), Delft, Netherlands, Aug 2010 (22% acceptance rate, 27/121).

See comprehensive document for full list of peer-reviewed journal entries and postgraduate presentations.