James Paton is a software engineer with a decade of experience building large-scale backend systems at Meta, currently focused on WhatsApp server infrastructure and Erlang interoperability. He has led technical efforts to migrate critical services to Meta's configuration platform, improve Erlang Thrift performance, and mentor and recruit engineers as a team tech lead. Prior work includes reducing latency and scaling recommendation feeds for Oculus, and contributing to FBLearner Flow and high-performance storage systems like RocksDB. His background blends a strong academic foundation in computer science and philosophy with practical systems work, from databases to ML infrastructure. Outside of engineering he’s a musician, reflecting a creative side that complements his pragmatic approach to problem solving. Based in Fremont, CA, he brings both hands-on implementation skills and roadmap-level technical leadership to distributed systems challenges.
10 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS, Computer Sciences, 3.5, Master of Science - MS, Computer Sciences, 3.5 at University of Wisconsin-Madison
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
BA, Philosophy (honors), minor Computer Science, 3.7, BA, Philosophy (honors), minor Computer Science, 3.7 at University of Iowa
Zero is a ZX Spectrum emulator for Windows, written using C#.
Contributions:2 pushes in 3 months
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