James Drakes
Staff Software Engineer at H-E-B
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames Drakes is a Staff Software Engineer and former CTO/co-founder with 11 years of experience building scalable, production-grade systems across e-commerce, platform, and startup environments. Based in Austin, he pairs hands-on engineering—spanning Elixir, Node, cloud migrations, and event-driven architectures—with pragmatic architectural leadership that values durable foundations over flashy code. He’s delivered measurable business impact, from a fraud assessment engine that saved H-E-B roughly $500K per period to platform migrations that improved developer velocity and security posture. As a team leader and mentor he prioritizes creating psychologically safe, high-performing cultures and has repeatedly driven cross-team coordination on large initiatives. Outside product work he’s focused on building networks and opportunities for underrepresented talent, and he brings a disciplined, question-driven problem-solving style informed by an electrical-and-computer engineering background.
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science, Computer and Electrical Engineering, Bachelor of Science, Computer and Electrical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin
English
Github Skills (35)
development-environment8
jetbrains8
remote-development7
ide7
vscode6
devcontainer6
hex6
stripe-api5
hex-package5
golang5
minikube5
go5
terraform5
stripe5
kubernetes5
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
TerraVerum/adumbra
Dec 2024 - Mar 2025
Web based coco annotation platform
Contributions:43 reviews, 32 PRs, 69 pushes in 2 months
jdrakes/SumoMe-Challenge
Aug 2016 - Jun 2017
Contributions:9 pushes, 1 branch in 9 months
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