Summary
Nicole James is a Group Software Engineering Manager with over two decades of experience leading large-scale cloud, networking, and test automation efforts, currently driving experimental open source projects for Azure CTO incubations. She has a strong track record at Microsoft building and scaling engineering and test teams, architecting continuous validation and deployment pipelines for MPP data warehousing, and improving control plane KPIs for Azure services. Her background in aerospace engineering and flight test adds a systems-level rigor to software validation and fault-injection strategies, informing robust release and certification practices. Nicole excels at mentoring, hands-on recruiting, and cross-group partnership to translate organizational vision into customer-focused features and measurable operational improvements. She brings a blend of startup and enterprise experience, from founding QA at a peer-to-peer collaboration startup to shaping early cloud platform tools, making her adept at both innovation and production reliability.
2 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS, Aerospace, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Master of Science - MS, Aerospace, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering at University of Colorado Boulder
Academics, Academics at Pomona High School