James Fischer

San Francisco, CA • (949) 433-1013 • [email protected]

Summary

Product-minded engineering leader driving a 20-engineer org to double-digit revenue growth through data-driven experimentation and rapid delivery. Seeking a leadership role leveraging experience scaling teams and accelerating growth through strategic product innovation.

Experience

Academia.edu • San Francisco, CA

Senior Engineering Manager
July 2024 - Present

Leading a group of 20 engineers across four subscription product growth teams: payments, churn, marketing, and new products.

  • Scaled Premium org 8 → 20 engineers; introduced EM layer and DORA metrics tracking
  • Grew subscription net receipts 24% YoY in Q1 2025 despite declining SEO traffic
  • Added installment billing, lifting payment success rate 15%
  • Rolled out researcher & professional pricing tiers, adding $482K ARR
  • Improved cancellation-flow save rate 21% with a values-based open-access message
  • Reduced cycle time 4 → <2 days by adjusting review processes and norms

Engineering Manager
June 2021 - July 2024 (3 yrs 1 mo)

Managed 7–9 engineers across ~2 teams at a time. Teams included monetization, content rendering, and content discovery.

  • Cut document rendering costs $1.12M/yr (93%) by replacing our legacy user-uploaded-document-to-HTML system
  • Boosted related content sidebar CTR by 33% by replacing TF-IDF system with cosine similarity between sentence embeddings
  • Launched a self-serve pricing test tool, unlocking a $100K/month revenue gain from an aggressive price point we weren’t going to try manually
  • Defined our Staff Software Engineer level and promoted its first member

Senior Software Engineer
June 2020 - June 2021 (1 yr)

Tech lead for our initial foray into open access publishing, Academia Letters. Built our manuscript tracking and typesetting systems.

Software Engineer
May 2018 - June 2020 (2 yrs 1 mo)

Worked on product growth initiatives, especially email marketing. Did some time on SRE and helped upgrade our monolith to Rails 5.

FileYourTaxes.com • Oxnard, CA

Software Engineer
August 2015 - May 2018 (2 yrs 9 mos)

Kept our personal income tax engine up to date for many state tax regulations. Added bulk tools for professional tax preparers.

Skills

Technical planning & roadmap ownership ● Engineering hiring & leveling frameworks ● Cross-functional collaboration (Product, Design, Data, Marketing)

Subscription payments (Stripe) & pricing ● A/B testing

Ruby on Rails, Python, TypeScript/React ● AWS & Terraform ● PostgreSQL, Redis, Redshift ● Embeddings & LLM-powered relevance/search

Education

Lewis & Clark College • Portland, OR
Bachelor of Arts, Computer Science • May 2018