James
Hawkins
Software Engineer · Phoenix, AZ
Software engineer & technical founder with 15+ years in early-stage and growth companies. I build full-stack products from zero to scale — currently building Swoopd.ai, an AI-powered job-discovery platform, and previously a veterinary SaaS that processed $20M+ in bookings and 30k+ appointments.
Experience
Software engineering experience
Fifteen years across operations, growth, and engineering — always as close to the problem as possible.
Swoopd.ai
Founder & Software Engineer
- Building an AI-powered job-discovery platform solo from the ground up.
- Built an ingestion engine that discovers and de-dupes thousands of company job boards across every major ATS (Ashby, Greenhouse, and more), plus paid APIs and LinkedIn, into a unified relational database.
- Implemented hybrid semantic search (pgvector + OpenAI embeddings fused with Postgres full-text ranking) and AI job-matching via Claude's Message Batches API for a ~50% cost reduction.
- Shipped Stripe subscription billing, a per-user credit and cost-governance system, and a sharded cron pipeline for ingestion, scoring, embedding, and archival.
SimpleDVM
Technical Cofounder / Senior Software Engineer
- Sole software engineer, built a feature-rich practice management SaaS for mobile veterinarians from the ground up.
- Processed over $20M in bookings and 30k+ appointments in under 3 years, with 99.99% uptime.
- Shipped calendar management, online booking, SMS/email/phone comms, PDF generation, e-signing, invoicing, payments, inventory management, client portal, and medical records.
- Integrated Stripe, SendGrid, Twilio, Google Calendar, Quickbooks, Datadog, Posthog, Slack, and more.
Ethos Life
Engineering Manager, Growth Team
- Managed a team of 5 software engineers, fostering an environment of growth, collaboration, high performance, and career development.
- Served as engineering lead for the growth team, supporting multiple product teams, building user-facing products.
- Drove sprint planning and prioritization to keep projects on track and ensure company KPIs were being achieved.
- Spearheaded engineering strategy, execution, and future product development.
- Collaborated cross-functionally with product leaders and engineering managers to align technical objectives with broader business goals.
Senior Software Engineer, Growth Team
- Architected consumer-facing products related to the application funnel for multiple D2C insurance products.
- Designed, built, and maintained public and private APIs, ensuring scalability and security.
- Partnered closely with design and product teams to ideate, develop, launch, and test new features driving growth.
- Integrated with third-party software across various industries (insurance, identity verification, payments).
Uber
Senior Manager, Risk & Fraud
- Key role in scaling Uber's Risk team from 5 to 100+ employees while reducing loss rates by over 80%.
- Investigated fraud attack vectors and developed rules, products, and features to reduce fraudulent activity.
- Drove quarterly product planning and KPI tracking across six Product teams within the Risk organization.
- Wrote fraud detection rules in Python and SQL to scope and block attack vectors.
Senior Manager, Community Operations
- Piloted and trained the first team of dedicated support reps at Uber — the foundation of a 20,000+ person support org.
- Defined hundreds of support policies for riders and driver-partners around the world.
- Managed a team of 7 and maintained a sub-12-hour support SLA across the West Coast region.
Ashton Kutcher
Second Assistant
- Researched startups for potential investments and assembled dossiers for evaluation.
- Produced presentation decks for potential investors and business partners.
Education
Education
App Academy
University of Southern California
Skills
Engineering tech stack
Tools I reach for to build production systems.
Interests
Life outside of work
When I'm not building software, you'll usually find me moving. I'm a regular at the gym, have run several marathons, and am working toward an IRONMAN. Skiing is a genuine passion — I've skied across the US and internationally, and have an ambition to ski on all seven continents. I'm also a big Formula 1 fan and try to catch as many races in person as I can.
I'm also a frequent traveler with a growing list of destinations. I live in Phoenix, AZ with my 2 beautiful huskies, and spend a lot of time on Hacker News when I'm not outdoors.
Bucket list
- ✓Join a safari in Tanzania
- Sub-3-hour marathon
- Complete an IRONMAN triathlon
- Ski all seven continents
- Get SCUBA certified
- Solo parachute jump
- Visit all 50 US states (Missing: North Dakota)
- Attend 24 F1 races (Attended: Montreal, Austin, Zandvoort, Monza)