# James Austin > Staff Software Engineer @ Replit - AI Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/jamesaustin ## Work Experience ### Staff Software Engineer - AI @ Replit Jan 2024 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States ### Senior Software Engineer - AI @ Replit Jan 2023 – Jan 2024 | San Francisco, California, United States ### Senior Software Engineer - Platform @ Replit Jan 2023 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco, California, United States ### Software Development Engineer 2 - Luna Social Team @ Amazon Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 | Seattle, Washington - Worked with the Product and Design team to define the requirements, and UX for a Luna Social Graph, including breaking features into a set of milestones for iterative release. - Wrote the engineering design for how we would implement the Luna Social Graph, working with senior and principal engineers, and engineering managers from the three teams involved in the project. - Lead building and ensuring production readiness of the core service that maintains the graph, and worked with other teams in their codebases to successfully integrate with it. - Designed and built a system for replicating Luna’s social graph from DynamoDB to Neptune (AWS’ graph database) in order to take advantage of the strengths of the two databases. - Worked across the front-end and middle-ware teams in Luna to design and build a remote eventing system that allowed for triggering notifications and cache busting in the Luna client based on backend events. - Led project to migrate Luna’s playlist functionality from a legacy Amazon retail system into a new service with zero downtime. This resulted in a ~70% reduction in p50 page load times, and ~80% reduction in p99 load times for the playlist page. - Interviewed prospective members of the team and provided feedback for them to hiring managers. - Mentored an intern who successfully developed a feature to track player statistics across the social graph in order to power game suggestions. ### Software Development Engineer 2 - Luna Client Services Team @ Amazon Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | Seattle, Washington, United States - Designed and built Luna’s pre-launch invitation system. It successfully processed over hundreds of thousands of invitations in the first 24 hours. - Worked with senior engineering and product leadership to identify opportunities to more easily filter through large amounts of free text post-game session customer feedback. Trained and deployed a NLP model for identifying and classifying feedback, and identifying issues. - Worked with a Principal Product Manager to design, implement and deploy Luna’s first game recommendation system, suggesting similar games on each game detail page. Hundreds of thousands of game sessions were launched via this system. I also mentored two junior engineers to help them expand the initial solution. - Worked with security certifiers (including both internal and external security teams) to certify the security of 4 services, and worked with 3 other teams across Luna to certify their services as a security certifier. ### Backend Software Developer @ Effective Measure Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | Melbourne I lead the development of the businesses core dashboard backend. This includes the core REST APIs that map user's queries to the underlying Druid data warehouse. I've: - Built a query planner that can take in, merge, and optimize multiple queries, as well as map queries to multiple disparate underlying data sources. - Built debugging tools in React to visualize both planned and executed query plans in order to monitor for both correctness and performance. - Developed and maintained other dashboard APIs. - Maintained high test coverage (including unit and integration tests). ### Software Developer @ PwC Ventures Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 I worked as a software engineer on Nifty, PwC's platform for helping startups apply for the Government's R&D Tax Incentive. I also led the development of an internal iOS customer support messaging application. ### Insight Analytics Consultant @ PwC Australia Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 I worked across multiple clients in several industries, including banking (both international and domestic), gambling and telecommunications doing a variety of work, largely focusing on anti-money laundering, as well as customer segmentation. I also led development and improvement of internal tools and methodology, including the introduction of version control, the development of a client data profiler, and tools for automatically visualizing data flows. I worked with datasets as large as 1TB. ### IBL Student @ QSR International Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 ## Education ### Bachelor Of Computer Science Monash University Jan 2012 – Jan 2014 ### Self Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree Udacity Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jamesdaustin --- Source: https://flows.cv/jamesaustin JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/jamesaustin/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22