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James
Besant

Software Engineer

I build software for a living, and the apps I want to use on the side.

Currently at Culture Amp·MEL

About

Auckland → Melbourne

I’m a Kiwi software engineer in Melbourne with 5+ years in tech across Australia and New Zealand. I like the whole stack, from the data model to the last pixel, and lately most of my delivery runs through agents: Claude Code skills, MCP integrations and workflows that take work from ticket to merged PR.

On the side I build the things I wanted to exist: a speed reader that anchors every word where your eye already is (Fovea), an event-sourced training log just for me (Whainga), and a te reo Māori vocabulary game that is genuinely hard to put down (Kākano). Before that, an AI image series on TikTok that found thirteen million views (Prompted).

Grew up in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, and studied Computer Science and Information Systems at the University of Auckland. Melbourne is home now. Most weekends I’m building with Claude, eating spicy Thai food, climbing (badly), or learning how to use Blender.

Experience

5 entries
  1. Dec 2024 — now

    Software Engineer · Culture Amp

    Moved from hands-on implementation to AI-orchestrated delivery across Ruby, Kotlin and TypeScript codebases, lifting PR throughput while improving quality. Architected a redaction service that screens hundreds of thousands of survey comments a day, and led the team’s adoption of agentic tooling.

    • Ruby
    • Kotlin
    • TypeScript
    • Kafka
    • Claude Code
    • MCP
    • Datadog
    • PagerDuty
  2. Oct 2023 — Jul 2024

    Software Engineer · Programa

    Full-stack engineer on a project management platform for design studios, shipping features end to end across a Rails backend and a TypeScript/React frontend.

    • Ruby on Rails
    • TypeScript
    • React
  3. Sep 2022 — Aug 2023

    Software Engineer · Stax

    Helped migrate a Ruby monolith into a leaner, faster Go codebase on a cloud management platform for large AWS customers.

    • Go
    • Ruby
    • AWS
  4. Jan 2021 — Sep 2022

    Junior Developer · 1Centre

    Two years of full-stack work shipping production code in Ruby on Rails and React, including a machine learning OCR pipeline for identity verification.

    • Ruby on Rails
    • React
    • Python
    • AWS
  5. 2020

    BSc, Computer Science & Information Systems · University of Auckland

    Auckland, NZ

View full résuméPDF · opens in a new tab

Projects

04 on the side