James Coombs — Resume
Product Engineer & AI Systems Architect
James Coombs is a Product Engineer specializing in Design Systems at scale, AI Governance, and high-demand web application performance. Leverages a background in Psychology to engineer intuitive developer experiences, agentic AI workflows, and resilient front-end architecture that allows engineering organizations to move fast without breaking.
Experience
Senior UX Engineer
Dec 2024 — Present | Rev — Peabody, MA- Technical Product Management & AI Scale: Personally completed 127 Jira tickets using AI agents to ship 3x more production code faster, and built the tooling that helped PMs, designers, and 7 other engineers accelerate their own execution. Built and scaled the Platform Engineering discipline from an individual contributor role to an organization-wide standard, expanding a Radix/Tailwind component system to 60 production components.
- AI Systems Architecture & Governance: Designed and shipped a 1,766-line governance system for AI agents. Conducted a controlled study (n=9) proving that passive AI rules achieve 0% behavioral compliance, then built an active enforcement layer that actually works.
- Automated Migration Tooling: Built 12 custom CLI tools and an automated migration bot with 5-factor confidence scoring to safely transition 962+ files across 44 asset bundles. Managed live coexistence (880 files on old framework, 355 on the new design system, across 6 packages).
- Performance Optimization: Owned signup performance on the executive scorecard, driving LCP from 9.8s to 3.44s (-65%). Built the measurement and shipped RUM regression alerting that now pages on the three highest-traffic pages.
- Cross-Functional Enablement: Created the "Claude Design Production" pipeline, empowering Product Managers and Designers to rapidly prototype and ship production-ready prototypes directly to feature branches.
UI Developer
Jun 2020 — Sep 2024 | Cervello — Boston, MA- Technical Leadership: Led a cross-functional team of 6 front-end and full-stack engineers, driving feature delivery, code quality, performance standards, and developer mentorship.
- Dynamic Web Architecture: Architected an automated dynamic landing page generator leveraging Algolia, Cloudinary, GitLab, and custom Next.js API routes. These dynamic pages featured extensive chart and graph visualizations built for an enterprise client, blending rigorous data pipelines with pixel-perfect frontend craft.
- API & System Design: Engineered reusable form engines integrating HubSpot and FormStack APIs, alongside a site-wide user favoriting system.
- Core Infrastructure & SEO: Managed critical WordPress core updates, established technical system documentation, and led site-wide SEO/metadata overhauls using Algolia Search.
Full Stack Web Developer
Feb 2018 — Jun 2020 | Collette- Developed content models, templates, and renderings across Sitecore-based web properties and partner sites.
- Engineered modern responsive styling, search filtering, date picker controls, and blog architecture for Explorations.com.
- Architected full-stack tour itinerary PDF generation, download, and email sharing features.
- Built a custom React and Redux interface for an internal CMS managing tour metadata, video assets, and media libraries.
Web Producer
Mar 2017 — Feb 2018 | Putnam Investments — Boston, MABuilt responsive web pages using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Freemarker Template Language (FTL), completing rapid site deployments under strict financial industry compliance deadlines.
Education & Training
Psychology and Social Behavior
2013 — 2016 | University of California, IrvineAssociate's Degree in Psychology
2011 — 2013 | Marymount CollegeSkills & Expertise
- AI Governance (LLM Engineering)
- Performance Engineering
- Design Systems & Architecture
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
- React & Next.js
- Tailwind CSS & Radix UI
- Node.js & CLI Tooling
- Algolia & Search Integration
- Cloudinary Asset Pipelines
- Sitecore & WordPress CMS
- Redux State Management
- Cross-functional Leadership
- Developer Experience (DX)
- REST APIs & Microservices
- SEO & Web Metadata