Resumé

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James Nicholson's CV

Summary

Full-stack engineer who ships. 6+ years building production systems at Harvard, plus a recent streak at the AI frontier: hackathon placements across Anthropic / Qualcomm / Meta / PyTorch events, and consulting engineer for LM Studio. M.S. in Software Engineering, Harvard.

Projects and Highlights

Atrium

  • Feb 2026
  • Anthropic "Build with Opus 4.6" Hackathon
  • Demo video
  • Selected from 13,000+ applicants. Built a multi-agent technical hiring platform orchestrating three Claude agents (Architect, Observer, Copilot) behind a real-time swim-lane timeline UI.
  • Next.js + TypeScript + Anthropic API.

Logentic

  • March 2026
  • 3rd place, Llama Lounge Agentic Hackathon
  • LinkedIn recap
  • AI agents replacing the manual chaos of freight brokerage: real-time notifications, AI-driven carrier negotiations, and a lightweight web app that meets offline carriers where they are.
  • 3rd of 500 applicants in a 16-hour build. Demoed mid-hackathon to a real ICP who confirmed the negotiation agent solved a problem he hadn't yet articulated — and that he'd be a customer.
  • Built the agentic system on CrewAI, agent-to-agent payments with Skyfire, third-party tool connections via Composio, and Snowflake as the AI-optimized data layer.

Hindsight

  • 2025
  • Local-first memory for macOS (LM Studio / Element Labs consulting engagement)
  • github.com/nicholsonjf/hindsight
  • Paid consulting engagement with LM Studio (Element Labs) to build a reference local-first agent on their TypeScript SDK. Shipped as Hindsight: passive screenshot capture plus on-device vision inference, building a searchable personal timeline.
  • Swift capture daemon, React/Vite frontend, Express/SQLite/TypeScript backend. Delivered a public blog post and internal friction log that fed the SDK roadmap.

Beaker

  • October 2025
  • 2nd place, PyTorch / Qualcomm / Meta ExecuTorch Edge AI Hackathon
  • LinkedIn Recap
  • Voice-driven on-device lab assistant running Llama 1B on Snapdragon 8 Elite via ExecuTorch. React Native, fully offline.

HECTRE

  • May 2024
  • Harvard M.S. thesis, with Pfizer
  • nicholsonjf.com/hectre
  • Distributed, multi-threaded Python pipeline using Meta's Llama API to extract structured data from clinical-trial PDFs.
  • 20× throughput improvement versus prior manual process.

Experience

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Senior Software Engineer

  • Sept 2019 – present
  • Technical lead on a multi-year flagship website redesign; owned core architecture, mentored two engineers to full productivity, and led UAT across 12+ stakeholders covering 200+ test cases and 100+ bugs.
  • Designed and shipped the SAML2 authentication/authorization layer integrating enterprise identity providers (Okta) across the Chan domain.
  • Built an automated faculty-profile generator (PHP / JS / MySQL) and integrations across Emma (SSO, DKIM, contact sync), Salesforce, Snowflake, and WordPress multisite — replacing manual workflows with self-service tools.
  • Earned M.S. in Software Engineering from Harvard concurrently, with an LLM-focused thesis.

Stanford Graduate School of Business, IT Systems Analyst

  • Sept 2015 – Sept 2019
  • Built and iterated a service-request platform (Python, Google Apps Script) that automated scheduling, metadata tracking, and class-capture integration — saved hundreds of staff hours per year.
  • Shipped Tableau dashboards on platform data to drive management decisions.
  • Supported high-visibility events including MBA Admissions webinars (400+ registrants) and global distance learning programs.

Skills

  • Languages: TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, PHP, Scala, C, SQL
  • Frontend: React, Next.js (App Router), Tailwind, React Native, Vite
  • Backend: Node.js, Express, FastAPI, Postgres, Supabase, Redis, MySQL, SQLite
  • AI: Anthropic & OpenAI APIs, Claude Code, MCP, multi-agent systems, LM Studio, ExecuTorch, CrewAI, Composio, local & edge inference
  • Infra: AWS, Docker, GitHub Actions, CI/CD, Vercel, Okta / SAML2

Education

Harvard Extension School, MS in Software Engineering

  • Thesis: LLM-based structured extraction from clinical-trial documents (with Pfizer).
  • Coursework in AI, AWS, Operating Systems (C), Robotics/Autonomous Vehicles, Scala for Big Data, Mathematical Statistics, Cryptography.

University of Colorado Boulder, BS in Journalism