James Sturtevant is a Principal Software Engineer with 12 years of experience specializing in cloud-native infrastructure, Windows container support, and automation at scale while currently leading engineering efforts at Microsoft in the Greater Seattle area. He combines deep backend and DevOps expertise—evidenced by substantial contributions to high-profile open-source projects like Kubernetes, containerd, and Azure tooling—with a knack for improving CI/CD, testing, and Windows-specific platform integrations. A dedicated mentor and former technical evangelist, James balances hands-on engineering with teaching, often toggling between student and instructor roles to uplift teams. Outside work he brings leadership and risk-management experience from guiding wilderness expeditions, a background that informs his calm, pragmatic approach to complex production issues.
12 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Engineering, BS Computer Engineering at University of Rhode Island
Contributions:274 reviews, 113 commits, 74 PRs in 2 years 10 months
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to the automation and testing infrastructure of the `cluster-api-provider-azure` project. Their work included adding convenience scripts for manual testing, enhancing shell scripts to handle error conditions and improve code quality, and modifying the CI/CD pipelines. They also focused on incorporating support for Windows-based clusters and performed updates to the codebase to support the same.
Contributions:1 release, 232 reviews, 50 commits in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:James contributed significantly to the image-builder repository by adding and improving Windows support across various stages of the build and deployment pipelines. They implemented Windows-specific Ansible scripts and configurations for Azure cloud environments, integrated Windows support into the publishing pipeline, and enhanced the build process by disabling Windows prepull to avoid timeouts during CI runs. Furthermore, the user made adjustments to install key vault plugin for Windows images, illustrating a focus on cloud-native application builds with Windows.
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.
Request Free Trial
James Sturtevant - Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft