James Lave

< Staff Software Engineer />

jlave.dev at gmail.com | LinkedIn | GitHub

Professional Summary

Staff Software Engineer with 7+ years of experience architecting high-scale systems and driving technical strategy. Proven track record of modernizing legacy codebases, optimizing CI/CD pipelines, and spearheading AI adoption to accelerate developer velocity. Leverages a background in physics to bring deep curiosity and rigorous problem-solving to complex technical challenges.

Experience

Integral Ad Science (2020 – Present)

Architected and modernized the company's core client script, measuring 120 billion daily ad placements. Led the migration to TypeScript, which reduced debugging time by 30% and cut production bugs by 50%.

Engineered Seleste, a custom test optimization tool that saved 2 hours per release cycle. As the team's build & release expert, I optimized CI/CD workflows to ensure seamless, high-frequency deployments.

Spearheaded AI-driven development initiatives, establishing new patterns for agentic workflows using Cursor, Claude Code, and Mastra AI. These efforts have significantly accelerated feature delivery and technical problem-solving capabilities.


Orchard [formerly Dose Media] (2018 – 2020)

Overhauled Orchard's proprietary internal platform and public website, supporting its growth into a leading social media market research firm.

Designed and implemented a custom integration with Facebook's Marketing API, streamlining the analysis of hundreds of ad variants. This automation saved 8+ hours of manual work per project and eliminated configuration errors.

"James has... shown a talent for anticipating users' unspecified needs and implements solutions that are flexible enough to meet those needs as they arise.

"[He] writes very clean code and has excellent attention to detail. He also demonstrates initiative to update code or development practices in positive ways."

— Aaron Blondeau, Director of Technology

Skills

Open Source & Leadership