James Turnbull
Senior Vice President Of Engineering at Techstars
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Turnbull is a seasoned technology executive with more than two decades of experience building product-led engineering organizations and high-performing teams across startups and enterprises. Currently SVP of Engineering at Convergint and an active advisor and instructor, he combines hands-on DevOps and backend expertise with strategic leadership—having led engineering at Sotheby’s, Kickstarter, Glitch, and Docker. A prolific author of 11 technical books and an open-source contributor, his code and infrastructure work touches widely used projects such as Puppet, Prometheus, Logstash, and the Sensu monitoring ecosystem. He’s known for operationalizing developer experience and observability—refactoring build and packaging pipelines and improving CI/CD for projects like Vector and Danger. As an angel investor and operating advisor to firms like AirTree and Primary Venture Partners, he helps founders scale technology and people simultaneously. Trained in cognitive science and politics, he brings a rare mix of technical depth, product empathy, and systems thinking to complex organizational challenges.
18 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
The University of Melbourne
English
Stackoverflow
76reputation
5kreached
3answers
0questions
Github Skills (84)
testing10
circleci10
ruby10
automation10
build-automation10
eventsource10
monitoring10
markdown10
puppet10
haml10
collectd10
dockers10
clojure10
webui10
sh10
Programming languages (30)
Github contributions (5)
turnbullpress/dockerbook-code
Oct 2013 - Jun 2020
The code and configuration examples from The Docker Book (http://www.dockerbook.com)
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:1 release, 76 commits, 23 PRs in 6 years 9 months
Contributions summary:James's contributions primarily revolve around updating and maintaining the project's code examples and configurations related to Docker. They made several revisions to the `bootstrap.css` files, reflecting updates and potential modifications to the project's UI, while also adjusting the build and deployment scripts. Their work included addressing various compatibility issues, adding functionality via the `composeadd` script and updating dependencies.
docker-composedocker
riemann/riemann
Dec 2014 - Jun 2022
A network event stream processing system, in Clojure.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:14 releases, 3 reviews, 255 commits in 7 years 7 months
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to the back-end logic of the Riemann event processing system. They fixed documentation issues, added and fixed support for PagerDuty event formatting, and addressed deprecation warnings. Further contributions included renaming package references, and error handling within the Librato integration. They also worked on refactoring and code cleanup tasks.
stream-processingeventsdata-streamevent-streamriemann
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.