# Jamie Cai > Staff Engineer @ Cinder | Search and Rescue | Ex-Amazon (Goodreads, Twitch) Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/jamiecai Engineering leader and established software engineer with over ten years of experience (6+ years as a full stack software engineer, 4+ years in management/leadership). High familiarity with modern front end frameworks (React, Typescript, GraphQL, ES6), back end service/system design in Golang/Python/Ruby on Rails, and AWS infrastructure. Substantial experience with creating + growing teams and careers, providing long term technical strategy, project management/execution, incident management, and process improvements at a team and company level. Passionate about the outdoors, climate, and Trust & Safety. ## Work Experience ### Staff Engineer @ Cinder Jan 2024 – Present ### Senior Software Engineering Manager - Precommissioning @ SunPower Corporation Jan 2023 – Jan 2024 - Created and managed a new team responsible for building residential project management software to automate and parallelize existing manual workflows. Audited several third party software options to validate decision of building in-house software with executive leadership. Drafted team roadmap and worked with stakeholders to decide on a proof of concept feature. Wrote multiple 6-pagers for the team's vision/objectives, 2023 deliverables, and resourcing requests that were positively reviewed with the company's CEO, CTO, and Eng VP. - Took ownership of the Design Services team: an existing team of six engineers working on new software for panel design. Created quarterly roadmaps for the team and negotiated new deadlines with product+eng leadership to give more time for feature testing and bugfixing. Prioritized operational work that decreased backend latency by 60% and front end feature loading latency by 80% - Took ownership of the EDDiE team: an existing team of 5-6 engineers working on critical Sales software. Created 2024 quarterly roadmaps and technical prioritization, set up an oncall rotation for the team, defined engineering testing/QA best practices after priorities for dedicated team QA testers shifted, and helped improve the engineering quality bar on the team through PRs and ticket reviews. - Gave talks on best practices for writing incident post-mortems and an introduction to Golang. ### Senior Software Engineering Manager - Sitewide Safety @ Twitch Jan 2020 – Jan 2022 - Created and managed the External Safety team, starting with one engineer from the main Safety team and hiring three more engineers. Established processes such as team retrospectives, weekly execution meetings, a Kanban workflow, and team fun events. Set up initial mission + tenets for the team. - Took ownership of the Internal Safety team in August 2020, sharing all processes from External Safety and implementing others such as a product inject rotation and a monthly lunch & learn series. - Grew both Safety teams from 9 => 13 engineers and hired two engineering managers to take over the day to day of both teams. Promoted 3 junior engineers to the next level and one mid level engineer to a senior engineer. Successfully transitioned an IC to an engineering manager. - Oversaw execution of major Safety projects including a large overhaul of user reporting functionality, new tools for handling user appeals, new reporting mechanisms for incoming legislation, resetting violating usernames, and additional account verification steps for users. - Key stakeholder in a project to overhaul Twitch's internal Safety systems - wrote portions of the project proposal that got reviewed and signed off by executives, coached a senior engineer on providing high level technical direction, execution plans, and coordination with external teams. ### Senior Software Engineer - Chat, External Safety @ Twitch Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 Chat - Rewrote the emote picker with a new rendering paradigm that decreased client render latency by 2.5x, preventing browsers from freezing for users who subscribed to large amounts of creators. - Created a static documentation site for the team and wrote 10 pages of front end docs - Pushed for interviewing excellent by holding sessions on how to be an efficient technical interviewer for engineers and how to hold debriefs/syncs for hiring managers. External Safety - Lead engineer on a large technical migration that pulled user blocking functionality out of a monolithic service with shared infra into its own independent repository and infra. Involved migrating >200gb of data and a traffic migration with no downtime for a feature that received ~50k rps. - Set up org-wide lightning talks, initially managing/organizing them on my own before creating a rotation of volunteers to help run them. There were 16 sessions of lightning talks between when I started them in Jan 2020 to when I left. ### Senior Software Engineer - Community @ Goodreads.com Jan 2016 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area - Team lead: established team yearly roadmap with stakeholders, added new team processes such as pre-development steps and ticket auditing meetings, shortened the team's on call rotations - Introduced Redux and Redux testing utilities by creating a mobile version of the user settings page - Lead engineer who built a new service to increase user engagement with 2-4 other engineers. Made sure each engineer was unblocked while also doing technical work such as writing the tech design document, infrastructure setup, data model creation, service integration into Goodreads web, and metrics/alarms creation. ### Other Roles & Responsibilities @ Goodreads.com Jan 2016 – Jan 2019 I have also held various roles and responsibilities outside of software engineering at Goodreads: - Team Lead - Bar Raiser/Interviewer - Girls Who Code Visit Manager - Hackathon Manager - On Call Lead - Load Testing ("Game Days") Lead - Engineering Mentor ### Software Engineer - Web, UX Overhaul @ Goodreads.com Jan 2014 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco Bay Area - Full stack development with Ruby on Rails and JavaScript ### Junior Systems Administrator @ Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department Jan 2012 – Jan 2014 | Berkeley, CA - Worked with other junior and main sysadmins to help graduate students, professors, and department staff with device troubleshooting, network connection issues, and other IT issues ### Co-founder, Past President, Secretary, & Publicity Manager @ Out in Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics, Incorporated (Berkeley Chapter) Jan 2011 – Jan 2014 | Berkeley, CA - Co-founded one of the first chapters of oSTEM, a professional networking group that caters towards people in the LGBTQ communities with science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) majors. oSTEM at Berkeley now has around 60 general members who attend meetings about interview/resume skills, company info sessions, professor/grad student talks, and more - Managed and organized the group as its second President by coordinating general meetings, keeping in touch with contacts, and making sure all officers were held responsible for their tasks - Increased group publicity by designing meeting flyers and the group’s sponsorship packet as well as sending out weekly event newsletters - Attended LGBTQ in STEM/Tech professional networking conferences in Washington DC, New York City, and Facebook HQ ### Software Development Engineering Intern @ Amazon Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 Increased code efficiency and decreased latency by creating a Perl Mason lint tool. I wrote a framework on top of the CPAN module Perl::Critic that made it compatible with Mason files. I also wrote fourteen different policies for the lint tool, ranging from basic syntax checking to more Mason specific rules. ### Software Engineering Intern @ Hooked Media Group Jan 2012 – Jan 2012 - Worked on UI improvements for Hooked (an Android app) by coding new layouts for activities in the app - Helped create a tablet version of the app that was ported into the initial Samsung Galaxy tablet app market by coding layouts for app fragments and linking features in the fragments together with adapters ### Communications Assistant @ UC Berkeley Department of Music Jan 2010 – Jan 2012 - Created 12'x2' banners for all ten department performance ensembles - Helped with flyer design for department events - Edited and maintained the department website. Added features such as a revamped alumni section with a photo gallery, an organized page of dissertations and departmental news, an entire section for the department's Alumni newsletter, and more - Helped with other publicity tasks such as sending out weekly events emails, keeping up with media contacts, and advertising events online ## Education ### Electrical Engineering and Computer Science University of California, Berkeley ### Phillipsburg High School ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jamiecai --- Source: https://flows.cv/jamiecai JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/jamiecai/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-29