James Conant

Senior Engineering Manager

Toast

Jul 2025 - Current (1 year 2 months)

Head of Engineering

Contently

Jan 2022 - Oct 2024 (2 years 10 months)

* Lead the engineering organization at the executive team level, continuing my responsibilities. Widening my area of strategic focus to the operation, growth, retention and profitability of the business overall, including market, investor and board perspectives and exposure. * Rebuilt Engineering department after rolling staff attrition the prior year due to long tenure, shifting market opportunities, and tripling the size of the department. * Lead a department-wide strategic initiative to rebuild the Contently Platform’s Text Editor from the ground up, which improved reliability and performance of our editor, almost entirely eliminating lost-content-edits. Additionally, allowed us to develop collaborative editing and parallel document work

Director of Engineering

Contently

Jan 2021 - Jan 2022 (1 year 1 month)

* Identified as a strong engineering leader by reports, peers, and CEO due to ability to build trust with teams, uncover problems and deliver concrete solutions, and lead with an empathetic people-first mindset. * Represented the engineering organization at the management team level - including hiring, budget, strategic direction, and annual customer security reviews. * Coached engineers on principles of DevSecOps, shifted code analysis, evaluation, and monitoring left in the development pipeline, and implemented DORA metric tracking across the engineering organization. * Migrated analytics data ingestion to kubernetes, reducing its resource footprint as well as streamlining its deployment process. * Built engineering dashboard giving engin

Engineering Manager

Contently

Jan 2020 - Jan 2021 (1 year 1 month)

* Led the migration from self-hosted Kubernetes clusters to AWS EKS managed Kubernetes clusters, creating new VPC infrastructure and required resources via Terraform. Consequently, I was able to migrate all production and staging applications while maintaining zero-downtime which eliminated weeks-long, fragile cluster and node upgrades and allowed us to test, verify, and upgrade in a single day. * Completed significant refactors and updates to the Analytics data pipeline as well as Elasticsearch clusters in order to improve reliability and availability, reducing analytics outages from a monthly occurrence to at most once per year.

Engineering Team Lead

Contently

Jan 2019 - Jan 2020 (1 year 1 month)

* Contributed to the implementation of early Kubernetes clusters and migration of applications off of AWS Elastic Beanstalk which allowed us to accelerate our deployment cadence from once every two weeks to multiple times per day. * Lead a group of engineers to explore and develop CI/CD solutions across our tech stack, as well as spearheaded the effort to create comprehensive documentation for tech stack and ensured that institutional knowledge was disseminated across the engineering organization.

Senior Engineer

Contently

Jan 2017 - Jan 2019 (2 years 1 month)

* Individually built and delivered critical enterprise features such as federated access via SAML and platform user and activity auditing. * Built out our enterprise CMS and CRM integrations as part of the enterprise engineering team. * Embedded in newly acquired business and engineering team supporting the integration of Docalytics into our existing Platform and infrastructure.

Software Engineer

Contently

Jun 2014 - Jan 2017 (2 years 8 months)

* Developed backend and foundational developer skill set. * Cultivated strong empathy for customers and developed content ideation solutions utilized by Fortune 500 customers.

S

Software Engineer

Jun 2013 - Jun 2014 (1 year 1 month)

Software Engineer

Stylisted

Oct 2012 - May 2013 (8 months)

Data and Systems Manager

Credit Union National Association

Sep 2009 - Mar 2013 (3 years 7 months)

Technical and Compliance Specialist

Aristotle

May 2008 - Sep 2009 (1 year 5 months)

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