James Paton
Software Engineer at Facebook
Fremont, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames 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-MadisonUniversity of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignBA, Philosophy (honors), minor Computer Science, 3.7, BA, Philosophy (honors), minor Computer Science, 3.7 at University of Iowa
Github Skills (106)
arm10
powershell10
tooltips9
azure9
synthesizer9
audio8
linux8
desktop-application8
extensible8
bash8
windows8
microsoft-azure8
remote-control8
flutter-apps8
microsoft8
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
wibblemonkey/vscode-markdown-auto-toc
Nov 2018 - Dec 2018
An extension for VS Code that adds support for an auto-generated table of contents to the built-in markdown preview
Contributions:2 releases, 15 commits, 7 pushes in 28 days
markdowntable-of-contentsvscode
wibblemonkey/8BitAnalysers
Jul 2025 - Feb 2026
Contributions:3 pushes in 7 months
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