James Westover

Uber — San Francisco, CA / Remote

Staff Software Engineer — Navigation Platform · February 2021 – October 2022

• Senior technical contributor on Uber's navigation platform — one of the company's largest distributed systems, operating at approximately 10,000 nodes per data center and serving all routing and mapping globally across 30M+ driver devices.
• Introduced off-route cross-street link support to the route object, reducing p95 off-route detection latency from ~5 minutes to ~2 minutes — a critical safety and UX metric affecting millions of active trips daily.
• Developed Python-based multiprocessing simulation harness scaling trip simulation capacity from 500 to 10,000 trips per run, enabling rapid regression testing across route deviation detection algorithms.
• Led critical incident response for GPS millisecond clock offset bug affecting data integrity across millions of devices globally — diagnosed root cause, coordinated multi-team remediation across sensor fusion, location, and navigation systems.
• Maintained J2ObjC transpilation system enabling Java routing logic to be shared directly with iOS clients — one of the few examples of cross-platform code sharing at this scale in the industry.
• Led Postmates acquisition integration: maintained business continuity for legacy distributed systems while designing compliant data deletion strategies across Uber's Schemaless distributed datastore using Go-based microservices.

Senior Software Engineer — Python Platform (Office of CTO) · January 2019 – June 2020

• Founding member of Uber's Python Platform team — mapped the entire Python dependency graph across hundreds of microservices, targeting the top 200 repositories and achieving 93% service conversion to Python 3 through purpose-built automation tooling.
• Major contributor to tchannel-python — the Tornado-based Thrift RPC transport library forming the backbone of inter-service communication across Uber's distributed system. Led Python 2→3 migration of the core transport layer.
• Became de facto Python infrastructure support for Uber's data science organization — maintained distributed notebook infrastructure, supported distributed query system, debugged Airflow fork used for ML pipeline orchestration.

Software Engineering Manager — Location Platform · February 2018 – January 2019

• Founded and built Uber's Location Platform team from scratch — designed architecture to centralize GPS and sensor data ingestion from the global driver and mapping fleet.
• Drove platform reliability from ~80% to 97%+ global data ingestion success — improving data quality for Uber's RideCheck safety initiative (crash detection, trip anomaly identification).
• Owned architecture strategy for globally distributed Cassandra cluster at 2–10M QPS: multi-region deployment design, consistency model selection (QUORUM vs. LOCAL_QUORUM vs. ONE) based on read/write priority, tombstone management for high-churn location data, and capacity planning for global scale.
• Directed anti-location-fraud program — built spoofing detection pipeline on top of location ingestion infrastructure, delivering $30M+ in annual savings by identifying and blocking GPS coordinate manipulation by drivers.
• Launched ShadowMaps initiative for multipath-aware GPS correction in urban canyons — real-time geospatial correction using H3/S2 cell indexing and shadow volume computation. (Engineering blog)
• Ensured GDPR compliance for location data collection from millions of drivers across EU markets — designed data minimization, consent propagation, and deletion workflows through the distributed pipeline.
• Made key engineering hires who went on to senior and staff roles; built team culture of high reliability and operational rigor from day one.

Postmates Inc. — San Francisco, CA

Senior Software Engineer 2 — Core Infrastructure · June 2020 – February 2021

• Led monorepo-wide Python 2→3 migration across 1M+ lines of code serving 100 engineers — including 3 coexisting Django versions with deep bytes-vs-unicode incompatibilities in high-throughput, latency-sensitive code paths.
• Delivered 4x CI build time improvement by orchestrating distributed test execution across Kubernetes pods — transforming 40–50 minute feedback loops into 10–15 minutes through intelligent test sharding and parallelization.
• Participated in weekly war room calls during peak-traffic scaling incidents — real-time incident response with infrastructure leadership during Postmates' highest-demand periods.
• Partnered with infrastructure team on Envoy service mesh adoption and OpenTelemetry distributed tracing integration — improving observability across the microservice fleet.
• Contributed to database reliability improvements using PostgreSQL with pgpool and PgBouncer connection pooling for high-concurrency marketplace traffic.

HERE Technologies — Berlin, Germany

Software Engineering Manager → Senior Software Architect · April 2015 – February 2018

• Architected a lambda data architecture for global mapping fleet telemetry: Apache Storm (Python bolts) for real-time stream processing, Kafka for durable event ingestion, Elasticsearch and PostgreSQL/PostGIS for storage and geospatial query — processing 250M+ GPS events per day from HERE's worldwide fleet of capture vehicles.
• Designed and built "Weatherman" — a Kafka-based orchestration system for dynamic map reprocessing workflows and QA pipeline management. Event-driven coordination of batch reprocessing jobs triggered by real-time quality signals from the streaming path.
• Designed Tornado-based backend APIs and React frontends for the Fleetvision fleet management platform — real-time GPS, IMU, and camera telemetry visualization including a 16-display video wall at HERE's Berlin HQ.
• Integrated JPEG-compressed sensor streams from FPGA-based encoder boards in the HT4 next-generation mapping rig — designed software abstraction layer for stream handling, metadata tagging, and reliable cloud ingestion coordination.
• Built and scaled engineering organization from 2 to 15 engineers across backend, frontend, mobile, DevOps, and embedded subteams — delivering 8+ concurrent programs including ADAS prototyping and corporate technology partnerships.
• Led ISO 9001 certification for safety-critical software governing mapping vehicles operating on public roads — authored QMS documentation and led external auditor engagement.
• Managed technology partnerships with Intel, Nvidia, Audi, and Mercedes-Benz for sensor-to-cloud ADAS and autonomous driving data infrastructure.
• Developed ADAS prototyping pipelines using ROS (Robot Operating System) for rapid sensor fusion and localization prototyping on real mapping vehicle data.

Sonobi — New York, NY

Software Engineer · December 2013 – January 2015

• Built RabbitMQ-based distributed job processing system in Python using multiprocessing and multithreading — processing analytics across 250M+ daily ad impressions.
• Explored log analytics pipeline using Kafka, Logstash, and Hadoop for impression-level event aggregation and reporting.
• Designed probabilistic user group overlap estimation using HyperLogLog and MinHash sketches stored in Redis — efficient intersection approximation for large user segments without storing full sets.
• Built ETL data warehousing pipeline using S3, Amazon Redshift, and Python — aggregating impression-level data for campaign analytics and optimization.

URBN — Philadelphia, PA (Remote)

Software Engineer · September 2024 – January 2025

• Maintained Django application managing URBN's internal product catalog across multiple retail brands.
• Contributed to asynchronous task processing systems using Celery and Kafka for event-driven workflow orchestration across the platform.
• Improved build systems and developer tooling for enhanced engineering velocity.

Westover Labs / Neher Data Services — Berlin, Germany

Founder (Westover Labs) & CTO (Neher Data Services) · 2021 – Present

• Architect and operate production distributed infrastructure: PostgreSQL with pgvector for semantic search (knowledge graph service), FastAPI inference services with structured logging and health monitoring, Ansible-managed deployment across bare-metal and cloud nodes.
• Build event-driven automation systems with webhook-based coordination, message queue integration, and resilient retry logic — applying distributed systems design patterns to agentic AI workflows.
• Design Bayesian sports modelling and DFS optimization system using PyMC5, Polars, and DuckDB — probabilistic inference pipelines with structured uncertainty quantification.
• Pioneer AI-augmented development methodology: orchestrate 12 specialized AI agent personas with intent routing, persistent knowledge graph context, and Jira automation — achieving team-level throughput as a solo engineer.

University of Rochester — Rochester, NY

Assistant Systems Administrator · October 2006 – October 2012

• Built and maintained Beowulf-style compute clusters using ROCKS with MPICH2 and OpenMPI for distributed HPC workloads — Monte Carlo simulations, molecular dynamics (LAMMPS), and electronic structure calculations (VASP).
• Constructed private cloud cluster using Eucalyptus (open-source EC2), later migrated to VMware — early hands-on experience with distributed virtualization and elastic resource management.
• Designed and implemented microsecond-precision timing systems for laser cooling in Bose-Einstein condensate experiments — real-time hardware interfacing under strict latency requirements.