James Hills
FDE Manager at OpenAI
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Hills is an engineering leader and manager currently heading Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) at OpenAI in New York, with a fast-rising two-year career focused on applying ML in production. He progressed from Solutions Architect to Tech Lead and now FDE Manager, combining hands-on model fine-tuning and full-stack contributions with people and project leadership. His open-source work includes notable contributions to the popular openai/openai-cookbook, adding notebooks and examples around function-calling fine-tuning and synthetic data generation. Prior to OpenAI he built data-science expertise at QuantumBlack (McKinsey) after early quantitative roles in finance and research, bringing strong applied-math foundations from Yale. Colleagues know him for translating complex model capabilities into practical, documented examples that help teams ship, not just prototype. Outside work he has a history of entrepreneurial and community roles—running an eBay business and coaching youth lacrosse—suggesting a bias for action and teaching.
2 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
High School, High School at Sidwell Friends SchoolBachelor's degree, Applied Mathematics, Bachelor's degree, Applied Mathematics at Yale University
Github Skills (9)
openai-api10
gpt10
python10
fine-tuning9
chatgpt9
jupyter-notebook9
api8
machine-learning8
apim8
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (4)
openai/openai-cookbook
Oct 2023 - Mar 2025
Examples and guides for using the OpenAI API
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:16 reviews, 27 PRs, 61 pushes in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to the "openai/openai-cookbook" repository by adding and updating notebooks related to the OpenAI API. The commits demonstrate a focus on fine-tuning models for function calling, including generating synthetic data and evaluating performance. They added and updated various code examples and documentation. They also fixed minor issues in existing example files.
apipythonopenai-apimachine-learningopenai
openai/swarm
Oct 2024 - Mar 2025
Educational framework exploring ergonomic, lightweight multi-agent orchestration. Managed by OpenAI Solution team.
Contributions:4 reviews, 6 PRs, 9 pushes in 4 months
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