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James Bell

@jamesbelldev

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Senior Backend & Site Reliability Engineer focused on scalable, cloud-native systems and automation.

United States

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What I'm looking for

I seek roles building and operating cloud-native, highly available platforms with strong automation, observability, and security practices, in teams that value reliability and measurable impact.

I am a Senior Backend and Site Reliability Engineer with 10+ years building highly available distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, and backend microservices across AWS, Azure, and GCP. I specialize in Go, Python, Java, Node.js, Kubernetes, Terraform, observability stacks, and SLO-driven reliability, with a proven record of reducing operational toil through automation and performance improvements.

I have led multi-region, fault-tolerant platform designs, executed zero-downtime migrations, and delivered SOC2/HIPAA-ready systems that improved query performance and reduced incident frequency. I prioritize measurable reliability, cost optimization, and secure, compliant operations while mentoring teams and delivering production resilience at scale.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Senior Cloud Engineer

Caylent

Oct 2024 - Sep 2025 (11 months)

Designed multi-region, fault-tolerant AWS platforms using EKS/ECS/Lambda and automated infrastructure provisioning to reduce manual steps by 70% and cut cloud spend by $1M/year while reducing MTTR by 50%.

Go Python AWS ECS Terraform Helm Prometheus Grafana CI CD AutoScaling

Senior Software Engineer

Foundation Medicine

Mar 2020 - Oct 2024 (4 years 7 months)

Built backend microservices (Java/Python) for a clinical genomics platform, improving query performance by 50% and reducing incident frequency by 70% while implementing SOC2/HIPAA-grade observability and secret rotation.

Java AKS Datadog Prometheus PostgreSQL Redis Istio Vault

Full Stack Engineer

Loadsmart

Mar 2019 - Feb 2020 (11 months)

Built logistics microservices in Go and Python and migrated infrastructure to GCP (GKE, Pub/Sub, Cloud SQL), executing a zero-dataloss MongoDB→PostgreSQL migration to improve consistency and query performance.

Go Python GCP Pub Sub Cloud SQL PostgreSQL Redis Kubernetes Docker CI CD

Web Developer

Contractize

Jun 2016 - Feb 2019 (2 years 8 months)

Built a digital contract automation platform using Node.js and React, automated server provisioning with Ansible, and improved first load time by 30% via Next.js SSR.

Node Express NestJS React Next.js PostgreSQL Ansible Nginx Docker

Mobile Developer

To Eat List

Jul 2015 - May 2016 (10 months)

Built mobile backend APIs with Node.js/Express and implemented A/B testing that improved user engagement by 25%, standardizing development environments with Vagrant.

Node Express React Native Ionic Capacitor Vagrant REST APIs A B Testing

Education

Degrees, certifications, and relevant coursework

University of Central Florida

Bachelor of Science, Computer Science

2011 - 2015

Completed a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science with coursework in systems, algorithms, and software engineering focused on backend and distributed systems.