# James Russo > Engineering @ HeyGen | Ex-Brex Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/jamesrusso I enjoy working on both technical and non technical challenges at growing companies ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ HeyGen Jan 2025 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area ### Technical Lead @ Empirical Health Jan 2024 – Jan 2025 | New York City Metropolitan Area - migrated our cloud infrastructure and 500 GB of data to GCP with less than 30 minutes of downtime - led a small team to develop the Android version of Empirical Health that could connect to Samsung, Fitbit, and Google Pixel watches ### Engineering Manager @ Brex Jan 2023 – Jan 2024 | New York, United States - Led the Bill Pay product team helping to re-launch the legacy product integrated with Brex's expense management platform and build new functionality like line itemization, custom accounting integrations, and improved OCR integrations (over 90% accuracy) - Hit all the time highs for MAC and transaction volume ### Staff Software Engineer @ Brex Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 | New York, United States - Technical Lead for backend developer tooling teams - Decision maker for internal Proof of Concepts with external tools like DX, Cortex, and Signadot - Designed and developed an internal engineering team and employee catalog and aggregator to unite profiles and metadata across tools like JIRA, Slack, Github, and other sources. Used for platform automation - Maintainer of internal developer survey's via DX - Developed a microservices internal testing platform built on top of Signadot to improve iterative development. Replaced previous system saving the company $2 million a year, reduced local development sentiment from top priority to 6th priority, and doubled local development sentiment from 30-60. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Brex Jan 2020 – Jan 2022 | Greater New York City Area - Brex Cash and internal developer platforms - Developed an auto updating CLI for internal use by developers to increase developer productivity. Used by hundreds of engineers daily, and extensible for other teams to add tooling into - Helped develop and launch our internal developr portal, Backstage, cataloging our internal services and building custom plugins to manage and create new pieces of software. ### Software Engineer @ Brex Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 | New York, New York, United States - Helped develop Brex Cash from beta to general availability and over $1B in assets under management ### Lead Software Engineer @ Iterate Labs Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 | Greater New York City Area - Engineer and Full time Employee #1 - Architected and built an IoT and data analytics platform from Bluetooth based devices to the cloud on AWS. Utilizing a wide range of technologies from dockerized containers running on Kubernetes to multiple AWS services like Kinesis Streams and datastores like PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch. - Worked with frontend and backend technologies including Ruby on Rails, Python + Flask, Elixir, and a Next.js SSRed React + Redux application. - Setup automated CI/CD using CircleCI for Ruby, Python, and Next.js apps for deployments to a Kubernetes Cluster. - Built an open source Ruby gem for interacting with Cassia Networks Bluetooth Gateway's and Access Controller's API's. - Recruited and hired to expand the team. ### Software Engineer Consultant @ Iterate Labs Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | Ithaca, New York Area - Started from scratch a Flask-Restful API backend server utilizing SQLAlchemy as an ORM, Postgresql as the database, and Celery background task runner with AWS Elasticache. - Setup, maintenance, and deployment of applications utilizing SSL on Elasticbeanstalk, Route 53, and Cloudfront. - Frontend development in React.js with Redux. - Set up continuous integration and auto deployments to AWS Elasticbeanstalk with CircleCI. ### Software Engineer @ Rockets of Awesome Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | Greater New York City Area - Working on a stack including a Ruby on Rails API utilizing the solidus ecommerce platform, React.js with Redux frontend, and a Postgresql database. - Developed a Ruby gem for communicating with the Newgistics 3PL API. - Built a data pipeline using AWS Lambda Functions, AWS Kinesis Streams, and Ruby on Rails. - Started from scratch a Next.js application to increase our SEO of our Product Display Pages. Deployed it onto AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service using Docker containers and automated deploys using codeship for CI/CD. - Created an NGINX Reverse HTTP Proxy to sit in front of all of our consumer facing applications and deployed onto AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service using Docker containers. - Created a rules based recommendation algorithm in Ruby on Rails to recommend more products on our product display pages and increase UPT. - Added Apple and Google pay integration into our checkout process using Stripe Elements to increase conversion. - Helped grow the team by recruiting and interviewing Software Engineers. - Paired programmed with other engineers on our team to help increase development speed and broaden our team's skills. - Experience using Google Optimize, Google Tag Manager, and Google Enhanced E-commerce. - Extensive experience using Segment.io for event tracking. ### Research Assistant @ Cornell University Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | Ithaca, New York Area Worked with Soumya Basu and Emin Gun Sirer to build Anonymix an anonymous communication system down to the IP layer for cryptocurrency transactions. ### Data Science Intern @ Rockets of Awesome Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | Greater New York City Area - Development in Ruby on Rails and research for Optimus, a rules based algorithm to recommend clothing to children. - Database design, integration, and development with Looker for data analytics and visualizations using the LookML language. - Extraction and Analytics of data using Looker, Postgresql, and Python. ### Contracted Developer @ GrowthCap, LLC Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | Greater New York City Area - Used Python and the Pandas library to merge contact and company information from four different CRM databases with varying fields totaling almost 100k records. Then uploaded into new CRM service with custom fields. ### Software Development Intern @ P1 Analytics Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Miami, Florida - Front-end, back-end, and database development for the Stocli Android app using Java, XML, PHP, Python, and MySQL - Front-end, Back-end, and Database development for the OutResearch website using HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, and MySQL - Database design and integration across multiple applications using OrientDB, Redis, and MySQL - Comprehensive testing across web and android applications. ## Education ### Bachelor of Science (BS) in Computer Science Cornell University ### High School St. Thomas Aquinas High School ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/james-russo-56026897 - Website: https://www.boredhacking.com/ --- Source: https://flows.cv/jamesrusso JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/jamesrusso/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-05