James Dowling
Engineering Manager at Canva
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames Dowling is an experienced engineering manager with 15 years building user-centric, scalable products across startups and large tech firms, currently leading engineering at Canva from Melbourne. He blends Agile and Lean practices with strong technical foundations (TDD, S.O.L.I.D.) to uplift teams through mentoring, technical recruitment, and pragmatic decision-making. His career spans roles at Cash App/Block, Zipline, Envato and Redbubble, where he paired UX-focused, experiment-driven development with measurable business outcomes. Known for guiding organisations through growth and scale, he favours data-led product decisions and empowering teams to own outcomes. A background in consulting exposed him to diverse tech stacks (Ruby, JavaScript, .NET, Java) and client domains, giving him a practical, cross-disciplinary perspective that informs strategic AI and infrastructure initiatives.
15 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Computer Science, Computer Science, Hons, Bachelor of Computer Science, Computer Science, Hons at University College Dublin
Github Skills (5)
zxcvbn2
javascript1
jruby1
dropbox1
ruby1
Github contributions (3)
jimmyjazz/cqalendars
Nov 2014 - Mar 2015
Contributions:37 commits, 15 pushes in 3 months
jimmyjazz/IDEF0-SVG
Nov 2010 - Aug 2018
Contributions:119 commits, 5 pushes in 7 years 10 months
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