James Fitzgerald
Verified Expert in Engineering
Technical Leadership Developer
Chicago, IL, United States
Toptal member since March 18, 2020
James is an entrepreneur and software engineer with a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Notre Dame. Throughout his career, he's developed several full-stack applications from the ground up and shipped them to millions of devices. The last startup he founded, Stremium, was one of the first open streaming platforms, which he sold to Mark Cuban's Fireside platform in 2023. He prides himself on his can-do, get-things-done attitude.
Portfolio
Experience
- Technical Leadership - 15 years
- Software Engineering - 13 years
- Android - 11 years
- Java - 11 years
- React Native - 10 years
- JavaScript - 10 years
- Chromecast - 5 years
- Google Cloud - 5 years
Preferred Environment
Fire TV, Google Cloud, React Native, React, Node.js, JavaScript, Embedded Systems, AOSP, Android, Java
The most amazing...
...thing I've developed was building an Internet TV platform from scratch with a community of over 100,000 users across multiple devices and operating systems.
Work Experience
Head of Engineering
Fireside Chat
- Led over a dozen engineers across global time zones to design and develop an interactive streaming platform.
- Designed and developed the world's first second-screen experience for interactive TV, where the user could participate in shows from their mobile device while watching on their Connected TV.
- Re-architected our back end running on GCP to bring our cloud bill from $100,000 per month to $25,000 per month, which actually became more scalable.
Founder & Chief Technology Officer
Stremium
- Developed an internet TV platform that aggregated a user's streaming TV subscriptions into a single UI across all of their devices.
- Created Android mobile, Android TV, Fire TV, Chromecast, and iOS applications, as well as a back end, deployed across Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and DigitalOcean.
- Developed a growth engine with programmatic Facebook ads and email marketing that led to over 1,000,000 registered users.
- Accepted into 500 Global's flagship program in San Francisco, then raised VC money and ultimately sold to Mark Cuban's Fireside platform.
CTO
OutKeepr
- Built an AI-powered vacation rental management platform from the ground up, enabling automated guest messaging, smart-lock and thermostat integrations, and direct booking capabilities.
- Engineered a scalable microservices architecture on Kubernetes with Terraform, reducing deployment times by 60% and ensuring high availability across environments.
- Developed an AI-driven 24/7 guest messaging system with sandbox testing mode, reducing manual host interactions by 80% while improving guest satisfaction scores.
- Implemented payment processing and contractor payout workflows, improving the efficiency of the cleaner/maintenance team.
- Launched the property onboarding flow with Airbnb/VRBO API sync, cutting host set up time from days to under an hour.
- Optimized infrastructure monitoring and logging pipelines with PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, and Fluent Bit, improving incident response times by 40%.
- Piloted product-led growth initiatives with early host cohorts, resulting in a 35% conversion rate from free to paid plans during beta launch.
- Drove cross-functional product strategy, incorporating user feedback loops that led to a 25% increase in retention across the first 90 days of adoption.
React Native Architect and Developer
Anthem [Now Elevance] - AI
- Developed a React Native app to allow doctors to interact with the Anthem AI back end.
- Managed a team of engineers in India to migrate some legacy code.
- Helped design back-end systems to enable end-to-end prototypes.
Lead Software Engineer - Android Client
ItsOn, Inc.
- Led team which built a mobile policy enforcement and billing engine from the ground up using the Android OS. This entailed Android framework hooks for telephony operations, kernel modules for data classification/enforcement and a user application.
- Led several projects to improve the mobile user experience, including daily user testing sessions with quick turnaround/feedback cycles.
- Shipped software embedded in over 8 million Android devices.
Software Engineer
Hewlett Packard
- Recruited as the software design engineer for the Digital Telephony Initiative (DTI), a small start-up group within HP. The DTI device consisted of a 7-inch touch screen running embedded Linux on an ARM processor.
- Designed and coded the user interface for HP TV's and Digital Media Adapters, including leading development work on the first YouTube application for Smart TVs.
- Recruited as one of the first engineers for the emerging software business, which was tasked with developing a new operating system based on Android for HP's small form-factor devices. Ported Android OS (AOSP) to an i386 netbook.
Experience
FitzyTV
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering
University of Notre Dame - Notre Dame, IN
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Node.js, React, REST APIs, Google Calendar API, Google Play API, FFmpeg, OpenAI API
Tools
Git, Terraform, Firebase Authentication, Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), Apache Tomcat, Flash
Languages
Java, JavaScript, HTML, HTML5, CSS, TypeScript, SQL, Sass, Python, C#, Kotlin
Frameworks
React Native, Next.js, Spring Boot, Django, GWT, OAuth 2, gRPC, Tailwind CSS, Bootstrap
Paradigms
Mobile Development, Microservices, Test-driven Development (TDD)
Platforms
Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Android, Kubernetes, iOS, Firebase, Twilio, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Android TV, DigitalOcean, Docker, Shopify, WordPress, Oracle
Storage
MySQL, PostgreSQL, JSON, Databases, Google Cloud, Cloud Firestore, MongoDB, Amazon S3 (AWS S3)
Other
Technical Leadership, Video Streaming, Cloud Services, AOSP, Software Engineering, OpenAI, Full-stack, Architecture, CIO, APIs, Client-side JavaScript Frameworks, Software Architecture, Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), Dashboards, Artificial Intelligence (AI), RESTFul APIs, Agentic AI, API Integration, App Store, Calendars, OAuth, Push Notifications, Integrations, Cloud Architecture, Solution Architecture, CI/CD Pipelines, Back-end, Data, Infrastructure, Integration, Orchestration, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Product Management, Prompt Engineering, Data Engineering, Front-end, Responsive Web Apps, SSG, Server-side Rendering (SSR), Web Development, AI Architecture, AI Engineering, Back-end Development, Chromecast, Shopify Customizations, OpenAI GPT-4 API, AI Agents, AI Chatbots, Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG), Chatbots, Vector Databases, LangChain, Firebase Cloud Functions, Healthtech, Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Embedded Systems, Fire TV, Content Delivery Networks (CDN), Videos, Smart TV
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