@REDACTED=false
@NAME=Justin Head
@EMAIL=jhead@jxh.io
@PHONE=(469) 236-6377
@LOCATION=Oakland, CA
@WEBSITE=github.com/jhead

# {NAME}

<div class="section headerInfo">

- {EMAIL}
- {PHONE}
- [{WEBSITE}](https://{WEBSITE})
- {LOCATION}

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## Summary

Staff Engineer with 15 years of experience building products and distributed systems across startup and enterprise companies, and a proven track record of ownership, leadership, mentorship, and execution across multiple teams and organizations. I love building stuff and I write a lot of code.

## Experience

### Principal Software Engineer, Workday <span class="spacer"></span> May 2021 &mdash; Present

- Lead architect for integration of acquisition (Flowise) into Workday's developer platform; led 10+ engineers across multiple orgs, authored technical proposal, secured buy-in, then executed
- Re-architected the platform observability product, projected to save >$2M/yr in OpEx by replacing Elasticsearch, while resolving scaling bottlenecks that enabled 10x customer expansion
- Prototyped and pitched multiple projects to leadership (VP/GM) to influence product strategy and get funding as top-level initiatives
- Led technical due diligence for executive customer briefings, addressing security and data privacy concerns to secure renewals and upsells
- Led the architecture group for a 100+ engineer org; mentored 12+ engineers ranging from junior to principal
- Designed consumption data pipeline for Workday's strategic pivot to consumption-based monetization, collaborating with architects across 3 orgs

### Senior Software Engineer, Workday <span class="spacer"></span> May 2019 &mdash; May 2021

- Led design and implementation of a distributed workflow engine; released to production and supported for 3+ years with billions of workflow executions
- Owned multiple services, on-call primary and secondary, supported junior engineers in triage
- Presented at internal developer conference multiple times, to 500+ attendees

### Software Engineer I-III, Workday <span class="spacer"></span> Jul 2017 &mdash; May 2019

- Built and released a serverless multi-region lookup service supporting millions of logins across Workday's mobile and web apps; joined an early stage project for a new workflow engine

### Co-founder, CubedHost <span class="spacer"></span> Dec 2011 &mdash; Jul 2017

- Bootstrapped a profitable cloud game server provider from zero to $500k ARR while at university
- Built a container-based control plane for over 10,000 game servers
- Managed hundreds of bare metal servers across 7 geographic regions
- Grew the business, negotiated contracts, built relationships with customers and partners
- Physically built and racked servers until my hands bled

## Skills

- **LANGUAGES:** JS/TS/Node.js, Go, Kotlin, Java, Rust, Bash, SQL
- **FRAMEWORKS:** React, gRPC, Protobufs, GraphQL, Express/Hono, ktor, Spring
- **DB/INFRA:** MySQL, Redis, Postgres, OpenSearch, Prometheus, AWS, Docker, K8s, Istio, Terraform
- **AI TOOLS:** Claude Code, Gemini, Cursor, agent teams, spec-driven development

## Projects

### radish (open source, github)

- Real-time weather radar with NEXRAD data from public datasets; built with Claude in Rust

### phantom (open source, github)

- CLI w/ UDP proxy to bridge game consoles (PS5/Xbox) and cloud game servers; 100k downloads

## Education

### University of Texas at Dallas, Software Engineering, Bachelors of Science <span class="spacer"></span> 2012 &mdash; 2017