James Roberts
Engineering leader building reliable mobile products and strong teams.
I build Android at Corporate Tools and previously managed mobile engineering at Tinybeans. Before software, I spent years leading retail teams at CarMax.
- 2.2 → 4+
- Play Store rating after rewrite
- Team result · Tinybeans
- 0 → 45%
- Mobile test coverage
- Team result · Tinybeans
- 18
- Android apps & games shipped
- Solo · Moonlet Labs
Selected work
Tinybeans
Lead Android Engineer → Engineering Manager, Mobile · Aug 2022 – Nov 2024
The problem
The family photo-sharing app had a 2.2★ Android rating, no automated tests, and little visibility into how releases behaved in the wild.
What I did
Led the Android rewrite, then managed the mobile team: hired and mentored engineers, introduced feature flags, and set an observability standard across the mobile projects.
The result
The rewrite lifted the rating above 4 stars, feature flags and tests made releases safer to ship, and features the team delivered grew user engagement by 27%.
Moonlet Labs.
My independent Android studio: small tools you open for ten seconds and trust, from a bubble level to a metronome and tuner, plus logic-only puzzle games with no guessing. Designed, built, and shipped solo on Google Play.
18 Android apps & games · Kotlin · Compose
Explore Moonlet Labs →Professional experience
Corporate Tools
Senior Android developer since 2025. I help lead development of the business-management app, set mobile best practices, and coach and review the work of other engineers.
10k+ downloads · 4.5★ on Google Play
Visit Corporate Tools →
PagerDuty
Android engineer on the incident-response app. I shipped features, led code reviews, fixed crashes to improve stability, and added automated tests to raise coverage.
500k+ downloads · 4.5★ on Google Play
View Android app →Independent projects
Failure Case
Engineering postmortems on YouTube: dams, bridges, power grids, and software outages, and why they failed. Built on Slate, my Claude-driven production pipeline: research, fact-checked scripts, narration, Remotion renders, Shorts, thumbnails, and scheduled publishing, with human approval at every gate.
Claude agents · Remotion · Cloudflare Workers
Watch on YouTube →
Porthole
A debug-only agent that lives inside a running Android app and answers questions about it: what recomposed and why, which frames dropped, and what is holding the main thread.
Kotlin · Compose · MCP server · Apache-2.0
View on GitHub →How I lead
I've led teams for nearly two decades. For 17 years I ran cross-functional store operations at CarMax, where I learned to hire, coach, and keep a team steady under pressure. For the last 9 years I've brought that into software.
I care most about coaching engineers and building teams that ship reliably: clear standards, honest feedback, tests and observability that let people move fast without breaking things.
Based in Minneapolis. Outside of work I explore new technologies, play guitar, and go hiking and motorcycling.
Let's talk
I'm always glad to hear about engineering leadership roles, mobile teams that need a steady hand, or interesting problems. The quickest way to reach me is email.