James Phillips
Co-Founder at Module Collective LLC
Los Angeles, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Phillips is a Co-Founder and double T-shaped software engineer with 13+ years building everything from fault-tolerant embedded flight software at SpaceX to massively scalable distributed systems at HashiCorp and Netflix. He combines deep systems-level expertise in high-performance C/C++ and kernel work with production Go experience across consensus, gossip, and in-memory data structures—contributing to well-known open-source projects like Consul, raft, memberlist, and go-memdb. A pragmatic tech lead who prefers hands-on engineering over people management, he excels at debugging cross-layer, hard-to-reproduce issues and owning full release lifecycles. At HashiCorp he drove novel extensions to SWIM-based gossip and shipped major features like network tomography, and at Netflix and Sequoia he bridged data platforms, APIs, and operational tooling. Based in Los Angeles, he’s equally comfortable in embedded real-time avionics and cloud-native deployments, and he often surfaces subtle correctness and performance fixes that others miss.
13 years of coding experience
25 years of employment as a software developer
Cal Poly Pomona
Github Skills (26)
udp10
algorithms10
immutables10
testing10
distributed-systems10
networking10
data-structure10
go10
computer-engineering10
radix-tree10
tcp10
data-structures10
raft10
immutability10
raft-protocol10
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
hashicorp/go-immutable-radix
Jan 2016 - Jan 2018
An immutable radix tree implementation in Golang
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:26 commits, 11 PRs, 26 pushes in 2 years
Contributions summary:James primarily focused on improving the functionality and stability of an immutable radix tree implementation. Their contributions include fixing bugs related to nil leaves and insert feedback, addressing comment typos, and refactoring the code to improve performance. They also implemented new features like mutation tracking, slow notify and committed functionality without notifying. The changes demonstrate a deep understanding of the internal workings of the radix tree data structure.
golangoomradix-treeimmutablehashmap
hashicorp/go-memdb
Oct 2015 - Oct 2017
Golang in-memory database built on immutable radix trees
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:17 commits, 15 PRs, 20 pushes in 2 years
Contributions summary:James made several contributions focused on improving the `go-memdb` in-memory database. They addressed potential issues by handling nil WatchSets, updated the codebase to align with a new implicit notify interface, and fixed a typo. A significant part of their work involved implementing and testing features related to watch channels and soft limits, optimizing the database's notification mechanisms.
golangmemorylrutransactionalgo
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