James Pennell
Technical Director at Maxis Studios - EA
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames Pennell is a hands-on Technical Director with 11 years of experience leading and scaling engineering teams to deliver high-performance full-stack products for tens of millions of users. He has architected resilient backend and stateful services handling hundreds of thousands of concurrent users and tens of thousands of requests per second, and shipped cross-platform client work across Unity3D, web, Android, and iOS. Comfortable with Java, C#, and Python, he designs cloud-native systems on AWS (EC2, DynamoDB, S3, Kinesis) and combines relational and NoSQL datastore expertise with caching strategies (Redis, Memcached) for low-latency operations. Beyond architecture, he’s practical in release engineering and live-ops—improving monitoring, CI, and incident visibility to keep large-scale game services healthy. He’s repeatedly built and mentored high-performing teams, owning hiring, performance management, and cross-team coordination for major EA titles. Based in Waterloo, he blends product-focused engineering with an appetite for prototyping bold client features and reusable platform components.
11 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Honours Bachelor of Science Computer Science, Honours Bachelor of Science Computer Science at Wilfrid Laurier University
English
Github Skills (24)
intellij-idea6
intellij6
java4
intellij-plugin4
google-cloud4
aggregates4
gatling4
kotlin3
maven3
appengine3
google-cloud-platform3
maven-plugin3
scaling2
gcp2
native-code2
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
mestevens/unity-maven-plugin
Nov 2014 - Nov 2014
Contributions:15 commits in 4 days
maven-pluginunitymavennative-code
awesometown/loquacious-octo-garbanzo
Nov 2015 - Dec 2015
Contributions:5 commits in 8 days
dropwizardservice-statusstatusservice-basedstatus-dashboard
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