James Hugard
Associate Director, Architecture
Mission Viejo, California, United States
Summary
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SeniorJames Hugard is an experienced software architect and engineering leader with over two decades of hands-on product architecture, development, and team leadership, currently shaping Battle.net studio experience and game-platform services at Blizzard Entertainment. He has led large, mission-critical distributed systems that run 24/7 worldwide—spanning client SDKs, back-end game services, API gateways, identity, social, matchmaking, and build distribution—while coaching technical leads and aligning long-term product vision with business needs. A prolific polyglot, he prototypes and ships production code in C++, Java, C#, Go, Python, Lua, F#, Haskell, and Scala, and has driven consolidation of SDKs and custom protocol and API gateway designs to simplify studio integrations. James combines director-level strategy with hands-on delivery history—from reducing incidents in large-scale installer services to architecting microservice and streaming visions—demonstrating both operational rigor and technical curiosity. Based in Mission Viejo, CA, he brings a track record of translating complex, high-availability requirements into practical engineering practices like CI/CD, infra-as-code, and cloud scalability. An oft-overlooked strength is his ability to move between deep implementation detail and organizational design, making him effective at both shipping code and shaping high-performing teams.
11 years of coding experience
27 years of employment as a software developer
English
Stackoverflow
3,252reputation
459kreached
55answers
12questions
Github Skills (93)
parser10
cpp10
api10
json10
libclang10
dom10
sax10
parser-generator10
dotnet9
opentx9
protobuf9
json-parser9
clang9
prost9
serialization9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
jhugard/froto
Jan 2016 - Mar 2017
Contributions:10 pushes, 3 branches in 1 year 2 months
protocol-buffersdotnetprotobufbufferscsharp
jhugard/prost
Jul 2023 - Oct 2023
PROST! a Protocol Buffers implementation for the Rust Language
Contributions:9 pushes, 1 branch in 2 months
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