James Westover

Westover Labs / Neher Data Services — Berlin, Germany

Founder & Fractional CTO · 2026 – Present

• Provide fractional technology leadership and strategic architecture consulting for distributed systems, AI infrastructure, and regulatory-aligned platform modernization.
• Operate lean engineering organization using AI-augmented development methodology — orchestrating specialized AI agents to deliver team-level throughput, demonstrating the operating model for AI-native technology leadership.
• Delivered multiple technical demonstrations for a New Jersey state government RFP — real-time passenger occupancy monitoring system with computer vision inference, distributed storage, and real-time analytics for public transit safety compliance. Proved ability to scope and deliver under pressure to demanding government stakeholders in a competitive process.
• Deliver production systems and iOS applications with on-device ML inference, subscription monetization, and privacy-first infrastructure design.
• German-registered company headquartered in Berlin with established EU business operations.

Uber — San Francisco, CA / Remote

Staff Software Engineer · February 2021 – October 2022

• Senior technical contributor on Uber's navigation platform — one of the company's largest distributed systems (~10,000 nodes per data center), serving all routing and mapping globally. Code contributed still runs on 30M+ driver devices.
• Led Postmates acquisition technology integration: maintained business continuity for legacy systems while designing compliant data deletion strategies across distributed databases.
• Led critical incident response for GPS millisecond offset bug affecting data integrity across millions of devices globally — diagnosed root cause, coordinated cross-team remediation, restored service reliability.
• Pioneered device fingerprinting approach for fraud prevention — identifying banned drivers creating new accounts on phones linked to previously banned accounts, contributing to platform integrity at scale.
• Championed developer tooling adoption — drove devpod adoption through large-scale simulation testing, improving developer productivity across engineering.
• Sustained high-volume technical interviewing throughout tenure — averaging 3–5 onsite interviews per week, contributing to hundreds of hiring decisions across the engineering organization.

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

• Answered the Office of CTO's call to form a dedicated platform team for Uber's enterprise-wide Python 2→3 migration — a company-critical transformation spanning hundreds of teams and 90%+ of production services.
• Mapped and organized the entire Python dependency structure across Uber's microservice ecosystem. Targeted the top 200 repositories for conversion, achieving 93% service conversion through purpose-built automation tooling.
• Became de facto Python support for Uber's data science organization — providing direct technical guidance through internal channels, helping maintain notebook infrastructure, supporting the in-house distributed query system, and troubleshooting their Airflow fork.
• Contributed to regulatory compliance tooling for Uber's London market expansion — ensuring Python platform infrastructure supported market-specific feature flagging required by UK transport regulators.
• Organized and catalogued petabytes of imagery data assets, establishing structure and governance for previously unmanaged data at scale.

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

• Founded and built Uber's Location Platform team from scratch — defined mission, secured headcount, made key hires (several remain in senior leadership roles today). Conducted 150+ onsite interviews over 12 months as hiring manager.
• Led GDPR compliance strategy for Uber's global location data pipeline — designed and implemented privacy-preserving data collection, consent management, and cross-border data transfer controls across EU jurisdictions.
• Drove platform reliability from ~80% to 97%+ global data ingestion success, directly supporting Uber's RideCheck rider safety initiative and crash detection capabilities.
• Directed anti-fraud program identifying and eliminating GPS location spoofing, delivering $30M+ in annual savings. Initiated machine fingerprinting approaches that evolved into Uber's broader device-identity fraud detection capabilities.
• Owned capacity planning and architecture strategy for globally distributed Cassandra infrastructure at 2–10M QPS, making consistency model decisions (QUORUM, LOCAL_QUORUM) balancing availability, performance, and data integrity.
• Contributed to hardware innovation — supported beacon project exploring additional sensor integration in driver-facing hardware to improve location accuracy and rider pickup experience.

Postmates Inc. — San Francisco, CA

Senior Software Engineer 2 (Staff-equivalent) — Core Infrastructure · June 2020 – February 2021

• Led monorepo-wide Python 2→3 migration across 1M+ lines of code serving 100 engineers — navigating 3 coexisting Django versions, deep bytes-vs-unicode incompatibilities, and performance-critical code paths (UUID generation at millions of calls). Built automation tooling where possible but drove hands-on resolution where automated approaches hit their limits.
• Delivered 4x CI build time improvement by orchestrating distributed test execution across Kubernetes pods — transforming a 40–50 minute feedback loop into 10–15 minutes, directly impacting engineering velocity for the entire organization.
• Participated in weekly war room calls during peak-traffic scaling incidents — providing real-time incident leadership alongside infrastructure leadership as the platform hit growth ceilings.
• Partnered with infrastructure and observability leadership on production readiness: service mesh (Envoy) and distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry) adoption.
• Lived through the full AWS → GCP cloud migration. All Kubernetes work was CLI and YAML-first — kubectl, k9s, deployment manifests, never the console. StatefulSets for databases inside k8s were the genuinely hard part.

HERE Technologies — Berlin, Germany

Software Engineering Manager — Capture Systems · April 2016 – February 2018

• Built engineering organization from the ground up — joined as individual architect, became hiring manager, and grew the team into a multi-subteam structure (backend, frontend, embedded, mobile, DevOps) delivering 8+ concurrent programs simultaneously: fleet management platform, real-time data pipeline, ADAS prototyping, next-generation mapping vehicle integration, route planning systems, inventory management, corporate OEM partnerships, and ISO 9001 certification.
• Led ISO 9001 certification program for safety-critical software: As engineering manager responsible for software processes governing vehicles deployed on public roads, authored comprehensive QMS documentation — workflow specifications, process controls, and compliance procedures for software that produced data used in production autonomous driving systems. Managed month-long regulatory preparation and led week-long auditor engagement. Certification achieved.
• Managed trilateral technology partnerships with Intel, Nvidia, Audi, and Mercedes-Benz for sensor-to-cloud autonomous driving infrastructure — coordinating roadmap alignment, resolving competing technical priorities, and delivering shared platform capabilities across organizational boundaries. Mercedes engagement involved fleet telemetry at production-vehicle scale (millions of vehicles).
• Drove talent acquisition strategy — championed conference sponsorship (PyBay/PyCon), delivering 2 senior hires at $10K total sponsorship cost versus $40K per hire through external recruiters. Represented HERE at developer events with hands-on technology demos that positioned the company as an engineering-first employer brand.
• Facilitated Agile transformation across distributed European engineering teams — implemented Scrum of Scrums, release train coordination, and cross-team planning processes.
• Navigated cross-border regulatory requirements for operating camera-equipped mapping vehicles across multiple EU jurisdictions — including complex electronics export/import compliance and country-specific restrictions on camera and sensor operations in public spaces.
• Architected fleet management platform integrating real-time GPS, IMU, and camera telemetry from mapping vehicles across the European fleet.

Senior Software Architect · April 2015 – April 2016

• Designed scalable data architecture for vehicle fleet ingestion and real-time analytics — lambda architecture supporting both streaming and batch processing at fleet scale. 250M+ GPS events/day.
• Ran the largest single unsharded PostgreSQL/PostGIS instance in production — the entire HERE world map in one database, pre-HDFS-GIS era. The hard problem: spatial queries at APAC/EMEA/LATAM/NORAM partition boundaries for autonomous vehicles driving across shard edges in real time. Invented the approach before the tooling existed.
• Used Apache Thrift as universal IDL: one schema generated Python services, C++ ROS nodes, and JS frontend types. Storm topology with Thrift-classified tuples for typed end-to-end streaming contracts.
• Built orchestration system ("Weatherman") for dynamic map reprocessing workflows and quality assurance — enabling systematic data quality governance across the mapping pipeline.