Summary
I’m a hands-on Senior Lead Software Engineer with a track record of building platforms and tooling that multiply team capability at scale. I architect systems, drive cross-organizational migrations, and identify the problems that aren’t on anyone’s roadmap yet — from redesigning event-driven automation platforms to standardizing container supply chains across thousands of repositories.
I co-founded OpenAPI Generator, now used by thousands of developers worldwide, and continue to build and contribute to open source tooling that reflects my belief that great platforms make other engineers faster and safer. I’ve recently stepped into a horizontal technical leadership role, working across ~24 engineers and a broad stakeholder network spanning product, program, security, and vendor partnerships.
Outside of work I enjoy music production, BMX, photography, and the occasional live-coding stream. Always happy to connect with engineers trading stories about hard problems and the solutions that eventually stuck.
Education
Experience
- Transitioned from directly managing a 7-person platform team to a horizontal technical leadership role (vacated by a Distinguished Engineer), guiding architecture and platform strategy for ~24 engineers and a 120+ cross-functional stakeholder network.
- Redesigned a legacy webhook delivery model into an event-driven AWS architecture (SNS/SQS/Lambda), reducing daily event volume by 97% (200,000 to 5,000) and cutting failure rates by 90% while absorbing 15% higher PR volume. The design was subsequently adopted as the organizational standard.
- Authored and open-sourced OpenRewrite Docker recipes to drive a mass migration to hardened distroless images, successfully standardizing supply chains and automating across 3,300+ production repositories, providing white-glove support to ~200 applications..
- Eliminated container vulnerabilities across 30-40 teams by standardizing distroless image adoption and resolving CI/CD pipeline gaps, sustaining zero CVEs over rolling 6-month windows.
- Diagnosed and resolved a highly complex DNS caching bottleneck across a multi-thousand container deployment, restoring baseline performance after previous mitigation attempts by other senior engineers had failed.
- Spearheaded the Spring Boot 2 EOL migration for ~180 APIs by developing custom OpenRewrite recipes (Java 17/Spring Boot 3) and execution scripts, eventually scaling these tools cross-organizationally to empower other lines of business to build their own automated migrations (500+ APIs).
- Architected an enterprise-standard ECS Fargate migration platform that enabled self-service adoption, reducing individual team migration effort from 1-4 days to 1-4 hours for 30+ teams.
- Drove shift-left security and observability standards across 30+ teams (nearly 200 components) by standardizing OpenTelemetry (CNCF) configurations and publishing comprehensive supply chain workflow documentation, significantly reducing platform support overhead.
- Mentored engineers across the organization and served as the primary technical advisor for CI/CD, AWS, and polyglot (Java/Go/Groovy) platform best practices spanning 30+ engineering teams.
- Co-founded community fork of Swagger Codegen (where I was a core contributor from 2016-2018) — now adopted by thousands of developers worldwide
- Established core architectural patterns and community practices (e.g. issue and pull request templates, user documentation, release processes)
- Built initial Gradle Plugin implementation, enabling seamless integration with build pipelines
- Led process improvements across tooling, CI/CD pipelines, and artifact publishing
- Collaborated with OpenAPI Generator community
- Participated in the design and construction of Microservices Architecture for new AdTech project(s)
- Built reusable developer tooling (sbt plugin, Docker compose testing environment) that streamlined local development workflows
- Mentored 6+ Junior and Senior level developers on SOLID principles, code review practices, and architectural patterns
- Led database migration from MySQL to PostgreSQL, coordinating cross-team efforts and minimizing downtime
- Managed multiple parallel workstreams (Spark Pipeline/DevOps, new development of 9 APIs, legacy API management)
- Team contributed to Spark Structured Streaming distributed data processing pipeline
- Drove process improvements for team formation and development workflows
- Core contributor to Swagger Codegen, maintaining C# and ASP.NET Core generators until co-founding OpenAPI Generator fork in 2018
- Built initial implementations for 4 new generators — Kotlin client (Java/Android), Kotlin server (Ktor), ASP.NET Core server, and Scala server (Finch)
- Contributed alpine-based Docker image, reducing image size from ~700MB to ~200MB
- Provided initial implementation of .swagger-codegen-ignore processing
- Contributed bug fixes in areas outside the responsibilities of my generators (Maven Plugin)
- Actively engaged with community through issue triage and pull request reviews
- Led architectural migration of BI product from monolithic jQuery/MVC to scalable SPA (AngularJS + RESTful APIs), improving performance and maintainability
- Designed and implemented SQL Server Service Broker messaging framework (via External Activation) to offload long-running processes from web applications
- Introduced Inversion of Control patterns across multi-layered architecture, enabling configuration-driven data flow to multiple backend systems
- Mentored junior and senior developers on SOLID principles, testing best practices, and architectural patterns
- Championed process improvements and development best practices across engineering organization
- Architected and delivered new REST API and UI using Scala/Scalatra/AngularJS, replacing legacy PHP system
- Refactored Node.js facade API for improved performance, implementing comprehensive testing framework and parameter validation
- Built automation tooling for Node.js applications including Swagger documentation generation from custom JSDoc annotations
- Led engineering process improvements — established git workflows, code review standards, pair programming practices, and Scrum adoption
- Mentored interns and junior developers; conducted technical interviews for mid-level and senior engineering candidates
- Member of development team for call center-centric telephony suite, CallRex
- Created maintenance patches of legacy software using C++, particularly related to VoIP packet processing using SIP, SKINNY (SCCP), and RTP
- Discovered Unicode bug in SIP packet header which could corrupt a Windows environment’s unmanaged memory at kernel or user space
- Created a unit-testing and functional-testing process integrated into the build using MSBuild 4.0
- Designed and developed software and web applications using Microsoft .NET 3.5
- Created custom, reusable controls and frameworks for reporting on large data sets
- Owned configuration and maintenance of a collaborative Drupal CMS for a global client organization; administered the Linux server hosting the instance
- Contributed to construction of a scalable, high-availability public-facing B2B web application using ASP.NET MVC 3.0 (Razor View Engine)
- Researched and implemented automated UI end-to-end testing using Gallio/MbUnit
- Participated in interview process for Senior .NET Software Developer Engineers
- Performed major enhancements and added functionality to a grants/budget management web application using ASP.NET/C# and Oracle 9i
- Upgraded application from .NET 1.1 to .NET 3.5 SP1; complied with coding and security standards for Federal Government client
- Interned beginning with Agility Healthcare Solutions, which was acquired by GE Healthcare during the engagement
- Performed bug fixes and enhancements in an HL7-compliant Rich Internet Application using ASP.NET 3.5 and C#, working within a mixed Agile/Scrum methodology
- Evaluated build process using CruiseControl.NET, MSBuild, and WiX
Projects
I’ve been active in open source since 2008 across 150+ projects, with a focus on
developer tooling, automation, and platform infrastructure. The following is a
representative subset.
jimschubert/rewrite-docker
OpenRewrite recipes for Docker and container image migrations. Started as a
personal project (live-streamed on Twitch), subsequently adopted internally
at work and used to migrate 3,300+ production repositories to distroless
hardened images. Basis for a proposed contribution to the OpenRewrite project
in 2025.
jimschubert/docked
A Dockerfile linting tool written in Go, built to surface common Dockerfile issues and best practices during development — before they become production vulnerabilities.
jimschubert/labeler-action
A GitHub Action for automatically applying labels to issues and pull requests based on title/description patterns. Written in Go; paired with the jimschubert/labeler CLI/library.
jimschubert/changelog
A CLI written in Go which allows for customizable changelog generation from
local or remote (GitHub) repositories. Also distributed as a GitHub Action:
beast-changelog.
New Tab Redirect!
A Google Chrome extension which allows the user to override the browser’s new tab page.
OpenAPI Generator Plugin
An extension for Jetbrains based IDEs which provides a GUI wrapper around OpenAPI Generator.
Publications
I extend my dedication to developer productivity into writing and performing technical reviews of written works.
Your First App: Node.js by Jim Schubert
I self published this book about the development life cycle of a full-stack node.js application, using Express/Angular/MongoDB.
Deploying Node.js by Sandro Pasquali
I was a technical reviewer for this book, which focused on the building, testing, deploying, monitoring, and maintenance of node.js applications.