James Coombs — Resume

Senior Design Engineer

• Discipline Founding: Built and scaled the Design Engineering discipline from an individual contributor role to an organization-wide standard, expanding a Radix/Tailwind component system to 62+ 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 3.3s (-66%). 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 "vibe code" and ship production-ready prototypes directly to feature branches.

UI Developer

• 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.
• 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

• 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

Built responsive web pages using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Freemarker Template Language (FTL), completing rapid site deployments under strict financial industry compliance deadlines.

Development Team Intern

Developed an API traffic simulation test fixture for clinical sample import interfaces and conducted UX research for biological sample e-commerce platforms.