# James Chen > Software Engineer at Zip Location: New York, New York, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/jameschen Full Stack Software Engineer with experience in leading multi-quarter projects, understanding and modeling complex business domains, and long term ownership of product areas. I am especially passionate about building solutions that fix customer pain points, building relationships with stakeholders, and coaching other engineers to multiply their impact ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Zip Jan 2023 – Present | New York, New York, United States ### Software Engineer (Payroll) @ Gusto Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 - Project lead of 2-5 engineers across multiple quarters. Managed the development cycle, groomed backlog, provided teammates opportunity for ownership, unblocked teammates, and provided mentorship. Point of contact for stakeholders (design, product, compliance, customer experience), keeping them engaged throughout development. - Project lead of customer facing feature to guide small-medium businesses to correctly register with state tax agencies and help them prevent punitive tax notices (200 notices per month). Written in Rails + React + GraphQL. Utilized Datadog APM to monitor endpoint performance. Designed the data model and API used by our feature and other engineering teams’ features. Launched to all 200k customers - Architected and led development of feature that allows internal teams to prevent our system from generating failed filings for customers. Worked closely with Tax Operations to understand their pain points and correctly model our data domain. 600 filings prevented each month, each of which would have created a customer support escalation - Designed part of our Payroll Data API, which allows other engineering teams to query for payroll and tax related data in a domain driven manner. Used by teams across Gusto who need our data for their specific use cases ### Software Engineer (Growth) @ Gusto Jan 2019 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco Bay Area - Engineering owner of our C2C, B2C, and B2B Referrals backend system, responsible for 12% of total customer adds. Authored the authoritative source of technical documentation at Gusto and facilitated knowledge sharing sessions with other engineers. Implemented referrals rewards experiments to drive customer adds. Regularly worked with Sales teams to solve customer referrals cases. - Key contributor to a re-vamped onboarding experience for customers migrating to Gusto from other payroll providers (React/GQL). Optimized processes for which our transfer team spends 70% of their time while migrating the customer onto Gusto. 2MM ARR increase per year from efficiency gains - Key contributor to our COVID-19 paused/deferred payments feature, which provided relief to customers in April 2020 by allowing them to defer their subscription costs. Saved 2.6MM ARR via reduced churn - Intern Mentor 2021 - Provided mentorship and onboarding to new hires. ### Mentorship Program Manager @ CollegeVine Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 - Oversee and train a team of 15 mentors covering 30-50 clients - Work closely with clients to provide specialized college admissions advice ### ACT Tutor/Mentor @ CollegeVine Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | Ithaca, NY - Weekly instruction in ACT Math/Science as well as college admissions advice for high school students ### Software Engineering Intern @ Facebook Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | Menlo Park, CA Facebook Local - Job Search - Revamped the job seeker experience for Jobs on Pages for desktop and mobile - Developed third-party job opening flow so that businesses can use sourcers (ZipRecruiter) to post job openings on their page ### Machine Learning Engineer @ Comake Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | Ithaca, New York Area Create recommendation system for file recommendations ### Software Developer @ Cornell Data Science Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | Ithaca, New York Area - Develop models and data processing pipelines for Kaggle Subteam ### Software Engineering Intern @ Wayfair Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | Greater Boston Area - Independently created a dashboard used by the Sales Applications Team - Increased team productivity by providing visualizations of B2B related metrics and visibility into the lifestyle of business accounts through tables and Grafana graphs - Implemented detection and retrying of failed records during B2B processing - Optimized SQL queries and server-side pagination for better page performance - Winner of Most Innovative Project award at Wayfair's 2017 Hackathon ### Software Development Intern @ Harvard University Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | Cambridge, MA - Developed on a large scale J2EE application supporting research administration. - Independently learned Selenium and created automated test scripts in support of continuous integration. - Collaborated with developers to create new features and implement bug fixes in an Agile environment ### Web Design Instructor @ College Academy Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 | Winchester, MA - Taught 4th to 8th grade students the fundamentals of designing websites with HTML. - Gave daily lectures and created class activities. ### Private Tutor @ Self-Employed Jan 2012 – Jan 2015 | Winchester, MA - Tutored three students in chemistry, algebra, US History, and biology. - Enforced concepts and held biweekly study/homework sessions ### Electrical Engineering Research Intern @ Northeastern University Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 | Boston, MA Contributed to a paper published in Scientific Reports (http://www.nature.com/articles/srep03688)and conducted background research, gathering over 100 scientific sources. Assisted in basic lab work. ## Education ### Bachelor of Applied Science (B.A.Sc.) in Computer Science Cornell University Jan 2015 – Jan 2019 ### Winchester High School Jan 2011 – Jan 2015 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jameszc --- Source: https://flows.cv/jameschen JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/jameschen/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-23