James Stephenson
VP, DevOps SRE at CentralReach
Maryland, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames Stephenson is a seasoned DevOps and SRE leader with 14 years in software engineering and over a decade in senior management, currently leading cloud operations for SaaS products in healthcare and previously running Appian’s global platform engineering organization. He has built and led distributed teams of 100+ engineers across the US, Australia, and India, delivering resilient, scalable cloud-native platforms and high-SLA services. James blends hands-on technical depth—Kubernetes, continuous delivery, observability, and cloud-native transformations—with a people-first leadership style that prioritizes autonomy, mentorship, and developing the next generation of managers. His career shows a steady progression from principal engineer and agile coach to VP, reflecting an ability to translate low-level engineering improvements into strategic platform-wide impact. Based in Maryland, he’s known for driving zero-downtime deployments and elastic scalability while keeping release engineering and operational excellence tightly integrated. An understated strength is his track record of turning legacy systems and small offices into scalable organizations and production-grade platforms.
14 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, Mathematics, Business, Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, Mathematics, Business at Olivet Nazarene University
Github Skills (15)
sdk10
docker-image9
bazel9
scalable9
build-system9
go9
docker8
operating-system8
docker-engine8
google-cloud8
google-cloud-platform6
python6
terraform6
terraform-provider6
docker-swarm4
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
james-stephenson/terraform-provider-unifi
Jun 2020 - Jan 2022
Terraform provider for Unifi
Contributions:28 pushes, 7 branches in 1 year 7 months
terraform-providerproviderunifiterraform
james-stephenson/bazel
Feb 2020 - Jul 2021
a fast, scalable, multi-language and extensible build system
Contributions:26 releases, 8 pushes, 28 branches in 1 year 5 months
scalablebazelmulti-languagebuild-systemextensible
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