James Cowling
Co-Founder CTO at Convex
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Cowling is a founder-CTO and systems engineer with deep expertise in distributed storage, having led design and migration efforts for Dropbox’s Magic Pocket and now building a serverless platform at Convex. He combines academic rigor from a PhD program at MIT with hands-on production leadership across storage, metadata databases, and filesystems. Known for operating at petabyte scale and optimizing millions of queries per second, he also mentors senior engineers and shapes company-wide architecture. Active in open source, he contributes front-end improvements to deployable AI projects like the AI Town starter kit, showing both backend depth and UI sensitivity. Based in San Francisco, he blends research-level thinking in consensus and fault tolerance with pragmatic product delivery. Don’t be surprised if a self-described “bad motorcycle mechanic” approaches systems problems with the same tinkerer’s curiosity.
6 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
PhD Computer Science and Engineering, PhD Computer Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyUniversity of California, San DiegoThe University of Sydney
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
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Github Skills (6)
nextjs10
user-interface10
react10
javascript9
css8
html8
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
a16z-infra/ai-town
Aug 2023 - Aug 2023
A MIT-licensed, deployable starter kit for building and customizing your own version of AI town - a virtual town where AI characters live, chat and socialize.
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:6 reviews, 10 PRs, 20 pushes in 7 days
Contributions summary:James primarily worked on front-end aspects of the AI Town project, making updates to the user interface. Their commits focused on modifying the layout and appearance of the application's landing page. Key changes included logo adjustments, the removal and restoration of UI elements, and path fixes for assets and music files to ensure proper rendering and functionality.
get-convex/convex-demos
Dec 2021 - Jul 2022
Demo apps built on Convex.
Contributions:17 commits, 40 pushes, 1 issue in 7 months
convexdemo-apps
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