Summary
Philip James is an engineering manager and founder with 11 years of experience leading teams to ship e-commerce and SaaS products, enterprise integrations, and creator-focused platforms. He blends hands-on technical leadership—having served as CTO at a pre-seed startup and rebuilt APIs and core systems—with strategic coaching and product intuition that helped drive an acquisition. Known as an empathetic leader and thoughtful optimist, he scales teams and processes (doubling velocity and growing engineering headcount) while stepping in to prototype solutions himself when needed. Philip also runs a management coaching studio and civic tech project, signaling a rare mix of operational rigor and creative practice. Based in the Bay Area, he’s open to executive coaching, strategy roles, and board work, particularly for startups in civic tech or the creator economy. An “artist tricked into coding,” he brings a maker’s curiosity to both product and organizational design.
11 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
University of California Santa Cruz
English, Spanish