James Holgate

Senior Software Engineer Ii @Hazelcast

Lead a 7-person Core Engineering team (4 senior engineers, 1 mid-level, 2 SDETs) as the only engineer holding a team lead role in Core - with authority to pull engineers cross-team as needed to resolve customer impacting issues. Responsible for technical direction, sprint planning, patch release control, and mentoring engineers across projects including internal white papers on platform architecture.Founded the Guardians initiative to handle high priority production incidents, which evolved into leading the permanent Customer Trust Team - now owning critical escalations, escaped defect triage & resolution, vulnerability response, and patch release governance. Personally resolved dozens of critical incidents for enterprise customers, including on-site engagements that earned direct executive-level recognition.Drive cross-team technical influence beyond my own team - shaping engineering policy, documentation standards, and production readiness practices across the org. Authored internal system benchmarks and resolved 50+ public documentation gaps.Delivered core improvements to Hazelcast\'s Raft consensus implementation and WAN replication, improving fault tolerance and stability under network instability without breaking ordering guarantees. Designed and shipped User Code Namespaces for safe classloader isolation in multi-tenant deployments.