James Pozdena

Louisville, COgithub.com/jpoz | linkedin.com/in/jpozdena

Professional Summary

Staff-level engineer building agent-platform infrastructure for running agentic runtimes and autonomous workflows in production, with hands-on LLM agent work and heavy daily use of coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Pi). Building on Temporal since Coinbase, with deep experience in distributed systems at scale, developer-facing SDK/API design, and the reliability, observability, and evaluation concerns of non-deterministic systems.

Core Skills

  • Languages: Go, Python, TypeScript, Rust, WebAssembly
  • Agents and AI: Applied AI / LLMs / LLMOps, agent frameworks, MCP, LLM evaluation and observability, agent memory, agent identity and permissioning, coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Pi)
  • Platform: Agent runtimes, autonomous workflows, SDK/API design, distributed systems, concurrency, microservices, REST APIs
  • Data and Infra: Temporal, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, Kata Containers, Kafka, DynamoDB, SQS, Redis, OpenTelemetry, Braintrust, incident response
  • Leadership: Technical leadership, architecture review, design documentation, mentoring

Experience

Beacon Holdings

Member of Technical StaffMay 2026 - Present
  • Designing and building Go-based infrastructure for running agentic runtimes and autonomous workflows.
  • Building across a Go monorepo - runtime, sidecar agent, and CLI tooling, plus deploy configuration - for autonomous, multi-step workflows.
  • Run untrusted agent code in isolated Kata Containers microVMs on Kubernetes.
  • Designing the agent workspace: memory that carries across runs, plus agent identity and scoped permissions. Lead its design documents and technical design sessions.
  • Built custom MCP servers and an MCP platform that brings third-party MCP servers into our cloud agent platform, with OAuth and per-user credentials and tool access.
  • Built eval suites and run tracing to measure and improve agent quality.

AngelList

Software Engineer (Applied AI)Feb 2025 - May 2026
  • Built and operated production LLM agents for internal operations and customer-facing product, plus the agent platform other teams built on.
  • Ran agent runs and long-running background jobs as durable Temporal workflows.
  • Built custom MCP servers and an MCP platform that brings third-party MCP servers into our cloud agent platform, with OAuth and per-user credentials and tool access.
  • Built eval suites and tracing (OpenTelemetry, Braintrust, homegrown) and iterated on agents using the results.

Reviso

Co-FounderOct 2023 - May 2025
  • Co-founded an AI document platform and built its custom AI rich-text editor from zero, owning technical direction and hands-on development.
  • Built eval suites and tracing for the AI editing features.

moonrepo (Y Combinator W23)

Co-Founder & CTOJan 2023 - Oct 2023
  • Built moon, an open-source build system and repository management tool written in Rust, and moonbase, its cloud caching and CI insights platform.
  • Led product and engineering as CTO, owning developer-facing tooling, public interfaces, and open-source community direction.

Coinbase

Remote

Senior Staff Software Engineer, Growth FoundationsNov 2020 - Feb 2023
  • Led technical initiatives on the Growth team through high-performance backend services in TypeScript and Go.
  • Architected and launched a consolidated notification system supporting multiple channels, apps, and organizations, sending billions of messages in its first quarter.
  • Initiated and led a Technical Architecture Review Process that raised design quality across teams.
  • Built on Temporal for durable workflow execution.

Monarch Money

Principal Software EngineerApr 2020 - Nov 2020
  • Sole backend engineer; launched v1 of the budgeting platform in Python.

Airbnb

Senior SWE → Engineering Manager, Service Excellence → Lead Engineer, Service Excellence → Staff SWE, Guest Store - MessagingFeb 2016 - Mar 2020
  • Technical lead for the next-generation messaging inbox, migrating customer service traffic from email to in-app messaging, saving the company millions in service cost per year.
  • Progressed through senior, management, and staff roles, leading service-excellence engineering work.

Simple Finance

Software Architect / Backend EngineerOct 2011 - Feb 2016
  • Led backend architecture and scaling from 100 to 100,000+ customers.