JIM SCARBOROUGH
Software architect · technical lead

Build the hard thing.
Make it dependable.

I help teams turn consequential software problems into clear, reliable systems—especially where architecture, integration, production behavior, and AI-enabled workflows meet.

How I work

Senior judgment, hands-on delivery.

I bring more than three decades of software development to problems that are expensive, ambiguous, or simply too important to get wrong.

That can mean shaping a new backend, untangling a brittle production workflow, making search behave under failure, or putting clear decision boundaries around an AI-mediated system. I begin by clarifying the problem, constraints, and ways a system can fail—then make responsibilities, interfaces, and operational signals explicit. The goal is not maximum ceremony. It is to engineer the system to work as well as necessary, and no more elaborately than the problem deserves.

Selected work

Systems with real stakes.

Red Hat

Search reliability and customer self-service

Designed search-quality, failure-analysis, and autocomplete approaches for a global knowledge platform—keeping useful results available even under degraded, high-latency conditions.

Approx. $1.7M annual support-cost savings
ClearSpend / JustWorks

Greenfield financial-platform backend

Established service architecture for authorization, account verification, two-factor authentication, Plaid integration, and secure REST/OpenAPI patterns in a regulated workflow.

Architecture built for secure product delivery
Kiteframe

AI-enabled systems with reviewable decisions

Built source-grounded regulatory intelligence and assessment workflows that preserve context, expose decision boundaries, and make consequential outputs inspectable.

Current work in AI governance and product architecture
Capabilities

Deep technical range, focused on outcomes.

  • ArchitectureService boundaries, data models, APIs, integration patterns, and pilot scoping.
  • Backend systemsPython, Java, FastAPI, Spring Boot, Rails, SQL, OpenAPI, and secure workflows.
  • ReliabilityTesting, CI/CD, observability, runbooks, production diagnosis, and operational feedback loops.
  • AI and searchAI-enabled workflows, text systems, retrieval, ranking, evidence-oriented outputs, and governance.
Let’s talk

Bring me the system that needs to work.

If you need senior technical judgment alongside someone who still enjoys building the thing, email jim@scarb.us.