James Zetlen

Austin, TX | 512-940-3048 | zetlen@gmail.com | linkedin.com/in/zetlen | jameszetlen.com

Summary

Accomplished software architect who can lead your Web team to success beyond the dreams of avarice. JavaScript and Web platform expert recognized in the developer community. Builder of several leading enterprise frontend frameworks from the ground up. Gregarious mentor, capable and creative presenter with international experience, strategic thinker, and tactical executor. Wants the Web to win.

Work Experience

Senior Software Engineer (SDE V) | ID.me | Remote | 2023-

• Led and implemented overhaul of ID.me homepage and other landing pages, reducing page weight by 80% and bounce rate by 40%.
• Implemented several core features of ID.me platforms, including member advocacy features and partner self-service
• Personally migrated ~5,000 LOC of legacy frontend code to modern Web Components and a fast and safe production pipeline.
• Created a tool-aided feedback cycle process for tight integration between UX and Engineering design and development. Designed the necessary infrastructure, implemented public shared Storybooks organization-wide, wrote a process to export from UX source of truth into design tokens.
• Designed, led, and implemented modern frontend best practices across the engineering organization. Defined best practices, wrote tools to automate them, and integrated them into team feature work.
• Founded and ran Frontend Champions internal improvements team. Led regular meetings gathering feedback from feature teams, honing best practices, and planning short-term and long-term future projects.
• Mentored and upskilled developers to learn Web Components, frontend build and test tools, TypeScript, and other fundamentals of leading-edge UI development.

Senior Software Engineer | Adobe, Inc. | Austin, TX | 2019-2023

• Spearheaded integration planning and business alignment of Magento frontend projects and Adobe systems, from the exploratory phase to the implementation phase, via design documents, stakeholder meetings, presentations and one-on-one strategizing.
• Crafted UI Extensibility architecture for Adobe Experience Cloud unified apps, now in production with over 20 Fortune 100 customers. Crafted SDK for secure embedding of third-party UI at runtime, using JavaScript garbage-collection hooks to achieve a 90% reduction in memory leaks.
• Piloted several integrations of bundled microfrontends into Adobe's next-generation content rendering platform via islands architecture. Redesigned toolchain, resulting in a 70% reduction in bundle size and time to FCP (first contentful paint).

Lead Frontend Architect | Magento, Inc | Austin, TX | 2016-2019

• Orchestrated a total overhaul of the ~50,000 LOC frontend architecture for the Magento 2 ecommerce framework, producing over 1000 live Magento 2 PWAs (Progressive Web Apps), a 50% increase in surveyed developer satisfaction in the Magento third-party ecosystem, and a top bullet point for business value leading to Magento's $1.68B acquisition by Adobe.
• Devised an end-to-end plan for a Progressive Web App reference frontend for Magento 2; created PWA Studio project and branding concept and worked with marketing managers and technical writers to create a brand and persona for the new framework.
• Collaborated with Google on emerging best practices for ecommerce on Progressive Web Apps by joining the Chrome Advisory Board as a subject matter expert.
• Confronted with cloud infrastructure limitations, formulated a platform-agnostic declarative standard for PWA server-side behavior, UPWARD, wrote its reference implementation in JavaScript and supervised its implementation in PHP.
• Championed PWA Studio and its suite of tools by presenting talks and workshops throughout the international community of Magento partner events, speaking at more than a dozen conferences.

Senior Frontend Developer | PayPal, Inc | Austin, TX | 2015-2016

• Implemented 15% of key screens in the PayPal mobile web app, migrating to React.
• Created a simple and fast navigation UI by designing a multi-tiered gradual autosuggest system.
• Drove refactor of Node MVC apps to more modular components.

Frontend Architect | Volusion, Inc | Austin, TX | 2011-2015

• Frontend lead on the core team for Volusion's next-generation platform, Mozu.
• Engineered frontend technology stack for Mozu's admin-side and storefront-side needs, including theme engine and rendering strategy, WYSIWYG editing surface, and component system.
• Mozu was scaled to 100+ sites. It was acquired by Kibo Commerce in 2017; the platform is a current leader for B2B commerce in the Forrester Wave report.
• Authored Patent #8,522,134: Methods and apparatus for in­line editing of web page content with reduced disruption of logical and presentational structure of content

Technical Architect | Convio | Austin, TX | 2008-2011

• Led implementations of national fundraising campaigns for large nonprofit organizations.
• Pioneered a "reusable technical solutions" practice across internal professional services team.

Education

University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA | B.A. Neuroscience

Skills

• Languages: JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, CSS, Ruby, POSIX shell, zsh, Lua
• Environments: Browsers, Node, Web Components, WebWorkers, ServiceWorkers, Edge Functions
• Frontend Frameworks: React, Next.js, Lit, Svelte, Angular, Express, Magento, Knockout, jQuery
• Patterns: Design systems, design tokens, component libraries, REST, GraphQL, serverless, microservices, islands architecture, observability. Clouds: GCP, AWS, Vercel
• Tools: Webpack, Babel, SWC, esbuild, Playwright, axe-core, Docker, NGINX, OpenWhisk, Linux, MacOS, Windows
• Communication and Collaboration: Tech specs and proposals, design documents, diagrams, presentations, tech talks, training and workshops, documentation, mentorship and knowledge transfer, committing to the bit, alternating incremental and revolutionary change.

Extracurriculars

• Creator, maintainer and/or contributor of many open-source projects, especially NPM packages
• Member of Google Chrome Advisory Board, 2017-2021
• Speaker at SXSW 2015 on Responsive Design
• Speaker at multiple conferences and meetups about PWA Studio
• StackOverflow contributor