# James Wills > Software Engineer at Notion, formerly at Airbnb and SF Digital Services Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/jameswills San Francisco based developer with almost 10 years of experience touching all parts of the tech stack, though I specialize in fullstack web development. Previously, I worked on the Airbnb Anti-Discrimination team building an equitable platform for all users regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation. In 2020, I switched to the public sector to work for the City of San Francisco and work on the SF Digital Services affordable housing team. Currently, I'm working at Notion. ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Notion Jan 2021 – Present ### Software Engineer @ San Francisco Digital Services Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco Bay Area Full-Stack (Ruby on Rails and React/TS) developer on the Affordable Housing team where we worked on a public facing housing portal (https://housing.sfgov.org). Tech lead a project to convert the site from a legacy technology to React and Typescript with a gradual migration path. ### Software Engineer @ Airbnb Jan 2015 – Jan 2020 2017 - 2021, Anti-discrimination team: Tech-lead for various projects to reduce discrimination and systemic racial bias on Airbnb, including: - A feature to hide guest photos from hosts until their booking is confirmed. This feature had the largest impact to reduce discrimination in the history of the team. - An API-powered spelling and grammar suggestion UI launched as A/B experiment. This reduced discrimination by minimizing biased signals, such as capitalization in messages. 2015 - 2017, Instant Book team: - Built various product enhancements to increase Instant Book usage by hosts across site and Android app. In just two years these changes enabled Instant Book growth from less than 30% of all bookings to over 70%. Technologies used on both teams: 3-5 years experience: React + Rails Fullstack development 2 years Experience: Android/Kotlin 1.5 years experience: Backend development (Java) as a service owner and maintainer ### Software Engineering Intern @ Google Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | Mountain View, CA Used GWT to redesign the outline view on an internal web-based application development tool, developed user interface tests using Selenium WebDriver, wrote design documents for my projects, documented and reviewed code, and validated bug fixes. ### Cyber Security Research Intern @ Software Engineering at Maryland (SEAM) Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 | College Park, MD Contributed to BugBox, an exploit database for PHP web applications, developed python scripts using Selenium WebDriver to automate exploits on web applications, and created animations and a JavaScript based visualization tool to communicate our research to people outside of the cyber security field. ### Programmer and Interface Designer @ Approach Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 | College Park, MD Awarded $25,000 under the 2013 Future of Information Alliance Seed Grant competition for an educational iOS app that puts an innovative twist on campus walking tours. I worked on a team of four graduate students and myself and was advised by Dr. Jason Farman. I was the sole programmer and interface designer on the app. ### Member of Programming and Sensors Subgroup @ Hovercraft Competition Jan 2011 – Jan 2011 | College Park, MD Worked on a ten-student team for one semester to build an autonomously controlled hovercraft. Developed a cheap, accurate way to track the craft's position using two modified computer mice connected to an Arduino processor. ## Education ### Bachelors in Computer Science University of Maryland Jan 2011 – Jan 2015 ### Computer Science University of Maryland Jan 2011 – Jan 2015 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jamesbwills --- Source: https://flows.cv/jameswills JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/jameswills/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22