James Sturtevant
Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft
Greater Seattle Area United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames 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
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (48)
azuread10
service-mesh10
kubernetes10
container10
docker10
cloud-computing10
scripting10
lifecycle10
windows10
testing10
windows-containers10
microsoft-azure10
networking10
dockers10
cicd10
Programming languages (31)
Github contributions (5)
kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api-provider-azure
Feb 2020 - Dec 2022
Cluster API implementation for Microsoft Azure
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer & Automation Engineer
DevOps Engineer & Automation EngineerContributions:278 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.
cluster-apimicrosoft-azurek8s-sig-cluster-lifecyclek8s-provider-azure
kubernetes-sigs/image-builder
Sep 2020 - Dec 2022
Tools for building Kubernetes disk images
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer & Cloud Engineer
DevOps Engineer & Cloud EngineerContributions:1 release, 238 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.
disk-imagekubernetesk8s-sig-cluster-lifecycle
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