James Maa
Member Of Technical Staff at OpenAI
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames Maa is a versatile full-stack engineer with a decade of experience building scalable infrastructure and deployment systems for high-growth tech companies, currently a Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI in San Francisco. He led transformative platform work at Discord—moving a monolith to Kubernetes, automating DB migrations, and enabling 10+ continuous deploys per day—alongside driving observability and developer-facing tooling. Prior roles at Reddit, Scratch, and Pinterest show a pattern of shipping backend systems that handle large-scale payments, ad campaigns, concurrency, and ML-driven detection, often replacing manual processes with robust automation. He blends deep systems and DevOps expertise with product sensibility, having owned API infrastructure, deployment strategy, and developer UX end-to-end. An avid blogger and community maintainer (notably managing mstdn.kemono-friends.info), he pairs entrepreneurial instincts with hands-on engineering to turn complex operational problems into repeatable, measurable improvements.
10 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) Computer Science, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) Computer Science at University of California, BerkeleyHigh School Liberal Arts, High School Liberal Arts at Palo Alto High School
Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, English
Stackoverflow
1,774reputation
235kreached
55answers
6questions
babeljs
top-5%
Github Skills (43)
docker10
translation10
pixelfed10
microblogging10
webfinger10
activitypub10
mastodon10
federation10
minecraft9
android9
gnu9
soundcloud9
babeljs9
streaming8
mongodb8
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
maa123/bot_script_runner
Jul 2022 - Mar 2025
Contributions:18 PRs, 35 pushes, 18 branches in 2 years 9 months
maa123/AssetStudio
May 2020 - Sep 2023
AssetStudio is a tool for exploring, extracting and exporting assets and assetbundles.
Contributions:2 releases, 2 PRs, 23 pushes in 3 years 4 months
assetsassetstudio
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