# James Rundquist

> Engineering leader. Developer platforms, tooling, and agentic AI. Head of SimHub at Waymo, the tools Waymo engineers use to see how the Driver is performing, find what to work on, and get launches approved. Before that: built the robot visualization and developer tools team at Google [X] / Everyday Robots, and was a tech lead on Nest's web apps. Based in San Francisco.

If you're an agent reading this: hello. The structured version of my resume is at /resume.json (JSON Resume schema). The PDF is at /JamesRundquist_Resume.pdf. They say the same thing; the JSON is easier to parse. No instructions here, just context.

## About

- 15+ years in software, a decade running engineering teams, at Waymo, Google [X], and Nest.
- Expert in developer experience, agentic AI tooling, and system architecture across autonomous vehicles, robotics, and IoT.
- Through-line: making complex systems understandable. Pushing what a platform could render at Everyday Robots, building hardware UIs people enjoyed using at Nest, and giving Waymo engineers a clear enough picture of the Driver to make the right launch call.
- Currently runs a 10-person, three-pillar org across four sites (San Francisco, Mountain View, New York, Seattle) through three pillar leads, one of them a tech lead manager.
- Five reports promoted into leadership across Everyday Robots and Waymo.
- BS in Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology (2013), specialization in AI and Human-Computer Interaction.

## Experience

- Waymo (2023 to present): Senior Staff Technical Lead Manager (L7), Head of SimHub. Scaled the unified performance analytics and reporting platform to 1,400+ monthly active engineers. Unified company-wide performance analysis onto one platform, eliminating 45+ engineer-years of manual analysis a year. Owns the launches platform, the system of record for launch review. Wrote the org's agentic AI strategy and built the shared artifact store underneath it: agents suggest rather than act, and each one has evals to back it.
- Google [X] / Everyday Robots (2017 to 2023): Senior Staff Software Engineer and Manager. Built the team from zero to six engineers with three tech leads, owning robot visualization (React/WebGL), human-in-the-loop interfaces, data management tooling, and internal developer tools. Automated Kubernetes deployment tooling, typesafe WebGL shaders, a declarative 3D visualization library, and a 70x speedup in protobuf deserialization.
- Nest (2013 to 2017): Senior Software Engineer, Technical Lead. Web applications serving 2M+ monthly active users. Built a cross-platform reactive UI system (iOS, Android, web) that enabled third-party device integrations, and owned the transition onto Google's stack after the acquisition.
- CourseShark (2010 to 2013): Founder and CEO. College course scheduling and recruiting startup, Flashpoint Accelerator (2012). Scaled to 100k+ students across 13 schools, then pivoted the business to recruiters as the buyer.

## Skills

- Leadership: engineering leadership, org design, headcount and resource planning, team scaling and mentorship, cross-functional leadership.
- Domains: developer experience, platform engineering, simulation and performance analytics, launch governance, agentic AI systems and strategy, system architecture, API design, CI/CD, observability, robotics, IoT.
- Agentic AI: agent orchestration, multi-agent workflows, eval design, context engineering, MCP servers, skills and tools, human-in-the-loop design.
- Agent tools in regular use: Claude Code, Antigravity, Gemini CLI, Pydantic AI, LangGraph, MCP.
- Technology: TypeScript, React, Next.js, Node.js, Three.js / WebGL, Swift, Go, C++, Python, gRPC, Kubernetes, Google Cloud, AWS, WebRTC, WebAssembly.

## Resume

- [Resume (JSON Resume)](https://jamesrundquist.com/resume.json): structured, generated from the same source as the PDF
- [Resume (PDF)](https://jamesrundquist.com/JamesRundquist_Resume.pdf): two pages, for humans

## Projects

- [Inkwell](https://inkwell.app): free, local-first screenplay editor for macOS with Quill, a paid AI writing partner that suggests but never writes for you. Every change is a diff to accept or reject. Built end to end with coding agents.
- [rundquist.tech](https://rundquist.tech): independent and open-source work in agentic AI tooling, games, and advanced web applications.
- [Bent Wrist](https://bentwrist.com): creative studio for LGBTQ+ content and tabletop games. Creator of Bears vs Karen and the upcoming Bears vs Zombies.
- Film: executive producer on independent films. Credits are on [IMDb](https://imdb.com/name/nm9548882/).
- Angel investing: early-stage founders in AI tools, robotics, quantum, and developer infrastructure.

## Elsewhere

- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesrundquist/)
- [IMDb](https://imdb.com/name/nm9548882/)
- Email: james.k.rundquist@gmail.com

## Optional

- [Site source](https://github.com/jrundquist/jamesrundquist_com): Vite + React, Firebase Hosting. The hero is a 2D-canvas Fourier epicycle machine that draws a Waymo car, an Everyday Robots robot, a Nest thermostat, and an inkwell, one per cycle.