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I’m a Principal/Staff software engineer with deep backend and systems experience, and I’m especially driven by hard problems where messy systems can be simplified into something reliable and measurable. Across enterprise SaaS, identity/authorization, data platforms, and geospatial/AI workloads, I’ve built and evolved high-throughput services, designed OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect integrations, and worked on distributed ingestion and processing pipelines with a strong bias toward correctness and production stability. I have created order-of-magnitude wins by bringing formal reasoning and disciplined engineering practices to complex domains—whether that means using constraint solvers like Z3, optimizing raster/geospatial computation, or improving fraud detection and operational tooling end to end. I also enjoy mentoring and scaling team practices without needing direct authority, and more recently I’ve been hands-on with agentic AI workflows (Claude Code, custom MCP servers, and LLM-to-tool bridges) as part of a self-directed engineering investment between roles.…I’m a Principal/Staff software engineer with deep backend and systems experience, and I’m especially driven by hard problems where messy systems can be simplified into something reliable and measurable. Across enterprise SaaS, identity/authorization, data platforms, and geospatial/AI workloads, I’ve built and evolved high-throughput services, designed OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect integrations, and worked on distributed ingestion and processing pipelines with a strong bias toward correctness and production stability. I have created order-of-magnitude wins by bringing formal reasoning and disciplined engineering practices to complex domains—whether that means using constraint solvers like Z3, optimizing raster/geospatial computation, or improving fraud detection and operational tooling end to end. I also enjoy mentoring and scaling team practices without needing direct authority, and more recently I’ve been hands-on with agentic AI workflows (Claude Code, custom MCP servers, and LLM-to-tool bridges) as part of a self-directed engineering investment between roles.

James R. Young (Rob)

Back-End Developer, Software Engineer, Architect

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I’m a Principal/Staff software engineer with deep backend and systems experience, and I’m especially driven by hard problems where messy systems can be simplified into something reliable and measurable. Across enterprise SaaS, identity/authorization, data platforms, and geospatial/AI workloads, I’ve built and evolved high-throughput services, designed OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect integrations, and worked on distributed ingestion and processing pipelines with a strong bias toward correctness and production stability. I have created order-of-magnitude wins by bringing formal reasoning and disciplined engineering practices to complex domains—whether that means using constraint solvers like Z3, optimizing raster/geospatial computation, or improving fraud detection and operational tooling end to end. I also enjoy mentoring and scaling team practices without needing direct authority, and more recently I’ve been hands-on with agentic AI workflows (Claude Code, custom MCP servers, and LLM-to-tool bridges) as part of a self-directed engineering investment between roles.…I’m a Principal/Staff software engineer with deep backend and systems experience, and I’m especially driven by hard problems where messy systems can be simplified into something reliable and measurable. Across enterprise SaaS, identity/authorization, data platforms, and geospatial/AI workloads, I’ve built and evolved high-throughput services, designed OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect integrations, and worked on distributed ingestion and processing pipelines with a strong bias toward correctness and production stability. I have created order-of-magnitude wins by bringing formal reasoning and disciplined engineering practices to complex domains—whether that means using constraint solvers like Z3, optimizing raster/geospatial computation, or improving fraud detection and operational tooling end to end. I also enjoy mentoring and scaling team practices without needing direct authority, and more recently I’ve been hands-on with agentic AI workflows (Claude Code, custom MCP servers, and LLM-to-tool bridges) as part of a self-directed engineering investment between roles.

Available to hire

I’m a Principal/Staff software engineer with deep backend and systems experience, and I’m especially driven by hard problems where messy systems can be simplified into something reliable and measurable. Across enterprise SaaS, identity/authorization, data platforms, and geospatial/AI workloads, I’ve built and evolved high-throughput services, designed OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect integrations, and worked on distributed ingestion and processing pipelines with a strong bias toward correctness and production stability.

I have created order-of-magnitude wins by bringing formal reasoning and disciplined engineering practices to complex domains—whether that means using constraint solvers like Z3, optimizing raster/geospatial computation, or improving fraud detection and operational tooling end to end. I also enjoy mentoring and scaling team practices without needing direct authority, and more recently I’ve been hands-on with agentic AI workflows (Claude Code, custom MCP servers, and LLM-to-tool bridges) as part of a self-directed engineering investment between roles.

Skills

Experience Level

Expert

Expert

Expert

Expert

Expert

Expert

Intermediate

Beginner

Language

Javanese

Advanced

Work Experience

Self-directed engineering investment at Yuwakisa LLC

August 1, 2025 - Present

Hands-on work across modern AI tooling, formal methods, and backend infrastructure. Built a JSON-based DSL for Z3/SMT constraint validation where combinatorial constraints would otherwise explode. Developed hybrid, collaborative Claude Code/agentic engineering workflows and created custom MCP servers and agent harnesses to improve how deliverables are scoped, written, and reviewed.

Principal Software Engineer at Highspot

March 1, 2020 - July 31, 2025

Designed and shipped a product licensing and authorization framework serving hundreds of thousands of users across several hundred enterprise customers, supporting billions of authorization calls over five years with zero filed defects and zero production incidents. Delivered OpenID Connect integration for Microsoft and Salesforce strategic partnership flows, introducing OAuth 2.0 mechanisms and a one-time-use token system. Served as a senior mentor for the Accelerator program, helping newly formed teams establish practices and ship customer-impacting changes, increasing engineering discipline through influence without direct authority.

Staff Software Engineer at Premise Data

November 1, 2018 - March 1, 2020

Built a production fraud-detection system for a global crowdsourced data platform, performing large-volume analysis in BigQuery over user cashouts and account activity to surface coordinated networks of fraudulent accounts. Integrated user payments with external payment providers and helped update provider security mechanisms. Developed operational tooling for balance adjustments, transfers, and currency exchanges, reducing payment-issue turnaround from days to minutes.

Staff Software Engineer at The Climate Corporation (Bayer)

May 1, 2014 - August 31, 2018

Led organization-wide adoption of an OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect reverse proxy fronting public services, replacing multiple proprietary authorization schemes with a unified platform handling millions of requests per month. Algorithmically optimized a core precipitation-estimation step in a geospatial radar pipeline, improving raster computation performance by two orders of magnitude. Built geospatial land-area matching and image-analysis/feature-detection prototypes for plant-health workflows, plus statistical estimation frameworks bridging Python and R for science teams.

Software Architect at Egencia (Expedia)

January 1, 2012 - December 31, 2012

Designed an OAuth 2.0 service and a common Spring-based framework for a new public-facing service architecture, coordinating organization-wide adoption.

Architect, Data Science at Blab

January 1, 2012 - December 31, 2013

Re-architected an ingest-process-predict pipeline for social analytics at Twitter-firehose scale, improving throughput by ~100x. Built a genetic-algorithm prediction engine capable of running over 1M predictions per second.

Staff Software Engineer at The Walt Disney Company

January 1, 2006 - December 31, 2011

Contributed to systems and services including data streaming, URI-based resource-relationship management, and ad-serving integration (multiple patents and inventor awards). Designed next-generation login and registration systems serving ESPN, ABC, and other US Disney branded sites.