James Player
Founder & Recruiter at xtra navy
New York, New York, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames Player is a founder and technical recruiter with over a decade of experience scaling engineering teams from pre-seed to IPO, having delivered 600+ hires across startups and enterprise engagements. He runs xtranavy, an AI-augmented recruiting practice that emphasizes human judgment throughout full-cycle technical hiring, and currently partners on high-impact roles at The New York Times. Before founding xtranavy he led talent scaling initiatives embedded at fast-growth companies like MIRROR (now lululemon Studio) and achieved top-biller recognition across global recruitment teams. He also contributes backend work to notable open-source archiving projects such as ArchiveBox and a Reddit bulk-downloader, showing hands-on engineering chops beyond recruiting. Based in Manhattan, James doubles as a licensed Compass real estate advisor focused on luxury sales and rentals—an unusual crossover that sharpens his client-facing negotiation skills. He blends entrepreneurial recruiting strategy, practical backend engineering experience, and business development instincts to help VC-backed startups hire and scale efficiently.
10 years of coding experience
Maiden Erlegh School
Github Skills (12)
download-manager10
reddit10
archiving10
regex10
python10
archives10
django10
webarchive9
youtube9
archived8
oauth8
html4
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
Serene-Arc/bulk-downloader-for-reddit
Mar 2021 - Apr 2022
Downloads and archives content from reddit
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:10 commits, 5 PRs, 21 comments in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to the backend logic of the Reddit content downloader. They added functionality to handle mobile YouTube links, updated regular expressions for concise matching, and added support for v.reddit links. Furthermore, the user made changes to the OAuth2 authentication process by binding the socket to '0.0.0.0' and integrated the branch merges. The user also added the created date to the archive output.
downloaderimgurpythonprawarchive
ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox
Dec 2020 - Dec 2020
🗃 Open source self-hosted web archiving. Takes URLs/browser history/bookmarks/Pocket/Pinboard/etc., saves HTML, JS, PDFs, media, and more...
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 commits, 1 PR, 1 comment in 1 day
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to the back-end logic of the ArchiveBox project, specifically focusing on the addition and handling of archiving methods. Their commits involve changes to the form and view logic within the core components, adding a selector for archive methods and updating the code to correctly utilize the archive method selections. Furthermore, they refactored code to improve readability and efficiency. The user's work enhanced the usability and functionality of the archiving process within the application.
bookmark-archiverrsspythonbrowser-historybookmarks
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