James H. Stoup

Timeline

2022
Experience

Upstart

Jul 2022 – Present

Principal Software Engineer - Capital Marketplace

  • Responsible for creating the technical roadmap of Upstart's next-gen multi-product Capital Platform enabling $1 Billion in loan sales (45% balance sheet reduction) to investors in 2025Q4.
  • Influenced cross-functional VP-level leadership and 50+ engineers across 10 teams to adopt ClickHouse as the backbone of Upstart's next-generation external reporting system, supporting multi-billion dollar investor contracts with accurate, real-time compliant data.
  • Achieved a 66% reduction in infrastructure costs and improved reporting performance by 132×—cutting report generation time from 10 hours to 5 minutes for major Capital Providers.
  • Reduced p100 response times of a public API by 80%—from 30 seconds to 6 seconds—on a 8 billion row dataset by migrating to ClickHouse and designing an optimized schema tailored for analytical queries.
  • Architected real-time data pipelines for accurate point-in-time compliant financial reporting, and served as lead architect on a cross-functional distributed forecasting system that processes a month's worth of loan data in hours, enabling optimization of AI models, configurations, and business strategies to boost revenue and loan volume.
  • Delivered performance improvements reducing top-of-funnel latency by over 50%, including cutting applicant pricing time from 6 seconds to 300 milliseconds.
  • Mentored 15+ engineers through regular 1:1s, architecture reviews, performance evaluations, and cross-org talks, driving growth, collaboration, and technical excellence.
2021
Experience

Castle

May 2021 – Jul 2022

Staff Software Engineer

  • Designed and architected a public-facing real-time extensible querying and aggregation API capable of ingesting and filtering over 1 billion events per month.
  • Enabled seamless migration from Elasticsearch to ClickHouse in under a month, reducing infrastructure costs by 50% while improving real-time query and data pipeline performance.
  • Led the design and development of a greenfield analytics platform that empowers customers with deep visibility into fraud and security threats, unlocking high business value through actionable insights.
  • Built and integrated an OpenAPI-driven CI pipeline that automatically generates server-side validations, client SDKs, and public documentation, cutting more than 2 weeks of engineering effort for every new public API feature and accelerating time-to-market.
2018
Experience

Everfi

Apr 2018 – May 2021

Senior Software Engineer

  • Built and maintained features such as webhooks, supplemental questions, and performance enhancements across 8 microservices using OAuth2 and Doorkeeper, all under an event-sourced architecture.
  • Implemented a CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) architecture for the webhook system, improving maintainability, scalability, and error resilience through event-driven design.
  • Designed and launched a high-performance public API processing real-time data via Kafka to serve tens of thousands of events per minute, enabling businesses to programmatically track employee compliance and training completion.
2016
Experience

WeddingWire

Apr 2016 – Apr 2018

Senior Software Engineer

  • Oversaw development team to drive additional revenue through hotel and AirBnB bookings by implementing customer engagement platforms.
  • Architected and managed a high-profile rewards project serving 2 million users with a custom-built rules engine.
  • Implemented code review and technical design processes to share knowledge, mentor junior team members, and reduce risk to projects.
  • Reduced Continuous Integration build times by up to 30%, increasing developer effectiveness and reducing risk to product releases.
  • Designed and built a Push Notification microservice which increased vendor bookings by 40%, driving user engagement and additional revenue.
2015
Experience

Personal Health Insights

Jul 2015 – Jan 2016

Software Engineer - Consultant

  • Developed and designed a complex dynamic form builder.
  • Implemented audit history based on 12CFR11, which recorded data on creation, modification, deletion of records, and reasoning for modifications.
Experience

Sotera Defense

Apr 2015 – Jul 2015

Software Engineer - Consultant

  • Developed architecture to easily create new entity model screens, allowing deeply nested objects to be efficiently created.
  • Created a test suite using Karma to deliver a maintainable, flexible product for other developers to leverage.
Project

Yazda LLC ↗

Mar 2015 – Jan 2018
  • Developed both the public API using OAuth2 specs and the mobile apps for Android and iOS using Ionic/Cordova.
  • Managed strategy, conducted market research, and wrote a comprehensive business plan.
  • Drove strategic partnerships, negotiations, and public speaking to grow the business.
2014
Experience

Thorium LLC

May 2014 – Jul 2015

Engineering Lead - Consultant

  • Managed a team of developers, designers, and QA experts to deliver client product requirements.
  • Implemented quality checks such as user acceptance testing, minimum code coverage, and code reviews.
2012
Experience

Sotera Defense

Jan 2012 – Jan 2014

Software Engineer

  • Architected and re-designed a dynamic UI framework based on simple XML files, reducing development time from 3 weeks to 1 day.
  • Implemented a code review process for maintainability and easier code readability across the whole team.
2010
Experience

Akcelerant

May 2010 – Jan 2012

Software Developer

  • Created and implemented a code review process to improve code quality across the team.
  • Created in-house applications that tested performance of calls, queries to third-party databases, and web services, greatly assisting the development and QA teams.
  • Designed and implemented several interfaces using WCF to bridge our product and third-party applications.
  • Mentored new Senior Developers in process, software architecture, and the technologies utilized at Akcelerant.