James Westover

Engineering Manager — Technical Leadership, Team Building, Agile Delivery, Mentorship

Profile

Engineering manager and technical leader with a strong record of building high-performing teams from the ground up and delivering complex, multi-stakeholder systems at scale. At HERE Technologies, scaled an engineering team from 2 to 15 engineers — structuring it across backend, frontend, mobile, DevOps, and embedded subteams — to deliver Highly Autonomous Driving capture systems and partner integrations with Intel, Nvidia, Audi, and Mercedes-Benz. At Uber, founded the Location Platform team, drove GPS ingestion reliability from ~80% to 97%+, led a $30M+ anti-fraud initiative, and made key engineering hires who went on to senior roles. Currently at Westover Labs, acting as Head of Engineering over an AI-augmented development team — running sprint planning, mentoring contributors (human and AI), and owning delivery end-to-end across mobile, backend, and infrastructure. MBA-educated with a strong foundation in Agile, Scrum, and Lean Six Sigma. Available for fully remote EM roles across the EU.

Engineering Management Competencies — Mapped to Experience:

Team Building & Hiring: Built Location Platform team at Uber from scratch — made key hires who continue to thrive in senior roles. Scaled HERE Capture Systems team from 2 to 15 engineers across 5 subteams. Recruited across backend, embedded, mobile, frontend, and DevOps disciplines.
Mentorship & 1:1s: Regular coaching and career development at Uber and HERE. Identified growth opportunities for ICs, translated business objectives into personal development goals, and tracked progress against OKRs. Currently mentoring AI agents and human contributors at Westover Labs.
Sprint Planning & Agile: Led Scrum of Scrums and release train coordination at HERE across 8+ concurrent programs. Trained in Agile/Scrum and Lean Six Sigma methodologies. Ran sprint retrospectives, backlog grooming, and roadmap reviews across all manager roles.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: At Uber, coordinated with platform, data, product, and safety teams on RideCheck and ShadowMaps initiatives. At HERE, drove cross-company engineering alignment with Intel, Nvidia, Audi, and Mercedes-Benz. At URBN, partnered with platform and data teams on catalog and event processing systems.
Performance Management & Delivery Metrics: Owned delivery metrics for Location Platform: 97%+ GPS ingestion success, $30M+ fraud savings, 10x simulation capacity improvement. Drove 4x CI improvement at Postmates. Established OKRs and tracked team health at every management role.
Technical Roadmap & Strategy: Defined architectural strategy for Uber's Cassandra infrastructure at 2–10M QPS. Set 3-year technical vision for HERE Capture Systems, including next-gen mapping rig (HT4) and ADAS pipeline. At Westover Labs, owns full technical roadmap across iOS, backend, and infrastructure product lines.
Stakeholder Management: Regular executive-facing communication at Uber on compliance (GDPR), anti-fraud ROI, and safety system reliability. Engaged directly with HERE leadership and partner OEMs on autonomous driving milestones.
Compliance & Process: Led ISO 9001 certification effort at HERE — authored QMS documentation and led auditor engagement for safety-critical software governing mapping vehicles on public roads. Built GDPR-compliant location pipeline at Uber.

Management Experience

Westover Labs / Neher Data Services — Berlin, Germany

Founder & Head of Engineering (AI-Augmented Development) · 2021 – Present

Operate as Head of Engineering for a bootstrapped consulting practice — owning technical strategy, delivery planning, hiring decisions, and execution across all product lines simultaneously.
Lead an AI-augmented development team of specialized agent contributors — defining roles, assigning work, reviewing output, and iterating on team process. Pioneered methodology enabling solo-founder to achieve multi-team throughput through deliberate orchestration.
Run full sprint lifecycle: backlog grooming in Jira, sprint planning, daily standups, retrospectives, and delivery reviews. Maintain roadmaps across three concurrent product lines (iOS apps, backend services, infrastructure).
Hired and onboarded external contractors; established clear expectations, code review standards, and contribution protocols.
Own cross-functional alignment between product (App Store features), engineering (FastAPI + ONNX inference), and infrastructure (Ansible + Cloudflare + Tailscale) — translating business requirements into technical delivery plans.
Shipped two iOS apps to the App Store with subscription monetization — coordinating design, development, App Store review, and marketing page launch as a full product lifecycle delivery.
Manage vendor relationships: Apple (App Store Connect, StoreKit), Cloudflare (DNS, tunnels, edge), GitHub (Actions, Pages), Expo (EAS Build).

Uber — San Francisco, CA / Remote

Staff Software Engineer · February 2021 – October 2022

Senior IC on Uber's navigation platform — one of the company's largest distributed systems (~10,000 nodes per DC), serving all routing and mapping globally. Code continues running on 30M+ driver devices.
Led Postmates acquisition technology integration: maintained business continuity for legacy systems while driving compliant data deletion strategy across distributed databases. Coordinated cross-team dependency mapping and on-call coverage transition.
Mentored junior engineers through GPS millisecond offset incident response — led cross-team diagnosis and remediation while using the incident as a structured coaching opportunity.
Championed devpod adoption through large-scale simulation testing, improving developer productivity org-wide and influencing tooling roadmap decisions.

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

Founding member of Python Platform team — a cross-organizational enablement function supporting all Python development at Uber (~hundreds of teams).
Coordinated enterprise-wide Python 2→3 migration: mapped full dependency graph, aligned 90%+ of production services, and managed rollout sequencing across teams with varying readiness levels.
Ran regular office hours and debugging sessions for engineers across data science, infrastructure, and product engineering — effectively a dedicated IC mentorship role embedded in the platform function.

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

Founded and built Uber's Location Platform team from scratch — defined team charter, designed org structure, set OKRs, and made key hiring decisions for engineers who continued thriving in senior roles.
Drove platform reliability from ~80% to 97%+ GPS+sensor data ingestion success across global fleet, enabling Uber's RideCheck safety initiative.
Directed anti-fraud program identifying GPS location spoofing — coordinated with data science, trust & safety, and legal teams to operationalize detection and deliver $30M+ in annual savings.
Built GDPR-compliant location data pipeline — partnered with legal, privacy, and data engineering to define compliant architecture, document data flows, and satisfy regulatory audit requirements.
Ran weekly 1:1s, quarterly career development conversations, and performance review cycles for all direct reports.
Owned architecture strategy for globally distributed Cassandra infrastructure at 2–10M QPS — managed capacity planning, multi-region deployment, and consistency model decisions (QUORUM, LOCAL_QUORUM).

HERE Technologies — Berlin, Germany

Software Engineering Manager · April 2016 – February 2018

Built and scaled Capture Systems Software engineering organization from 2 to 15 engineers — structured across backend, frontend, mobile/tablet, DevOps, and embedded subteams to deliver Highly Autonomous Driving programs.
Led concurrent delivery across 8+ programs simultaneously: next-gen mapping rig (HT4), fleet visualization platform (Fleetvision 2), data ingestion pipeline (FVD), ADAS prototyping, inventory system, and OEM integration programs.
Conducted regular 1:1s, defined career ladders, ran performance reviews, and coordinated with recruiting for open headcount. Provided architectural guidance and technical mentorship across all subteams while remaining an IC on critical paths.
Facilitated Scrum of Scrums across subteams, ran release train planning, and coordinated cross-team dependency resolution. Managed sprint velocity, capacity planning, and stakeholder-facing delivery commitments.
Managed cross-company engineering relationships with Intel, Nvidia, Audi, and Mercedes-Benz — coordinating joint integration work, aligning on data formats, and representing HERE in technical partner reviews.
Led ISO 9001 certification effort — authored quality management system documentation, defined software process standards for safety-critical systems, and led auditor engagement for software governing mapping vehicles on public roads.

Senior Software Architect · April 2015 – April 2016

Led large-scale distributed systems efforts; spearheaded Apache Storm-based stream processing for real-time fleet data analytics.
Launched Python-based microservices architecture and established engineering standards adopted across the capture systems program.
Acted as technical anchor for cross-team planning — bridging architecture decisions between embedded, backend, and platform teams.

URBN — Philadelphia, PA (Remote)

Software Engineer · September 2024 – January 2025

Contributed to Django-based platform serving URBN's internal product catalog across Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, and Free People brands — working within a multi-team platform engineering org.
Improved build systems and developer tooling, reducing friction in the engineering feedback loop for a team of dozens of engineers.
Contributed to asynchronous task processing (Celery, Kafka) — collaborating with platform team leads on event-driven workflow design.

Postmates Inc. — San Francisco, CA

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

Led monorepo-wide Python 2→3 migration — coordinated across 100 engineers, managing dependency sequencing and risk across 3 coexisting Django versions.
Delivered 4x CI build time improvement by designing distributed test execution across Kubernetes pods — transformed 40–50 minute builds to 10–15 minutes, directly improving team delivery cadence.
Participated in weekly war room calls during peak-traffic scaling incidents — real-time incident response alongside infrastructure leadership.

Sonobi — New York, NY

Software Engineer · December 2013 – January 2015

Built RabbitMQ-based distributed job processing and ETL pipelines handling 250M+ daily ad impressions.
Designed probabilistic overlap estimation system using HyperLogLog and MinHash.

Technical Depth

Strong hands-on engineering foundation enables credible technical leadership and effective code review. Production experience across:

Education

MBA, Business Administration — Quantic School of Business and Technology, 2017