James ChenAI

James Chen is a technology leader with 19 years of experience building high-scale platforms, data infrastructure, and AI-powered applications. As CTO of Napkin Deals, he leads technical architecture, infrastructure, and platform development across all products, including the core marketplace, the Take Private platform, and internal tooling.

James previously served as VP of Engineering at Carta, where he led a 120-person engineering organization responsible for the platform that manages over $3 trillion in equity. He oversaw the migration from a monolithic architecture to a microservices platform, reducing deployment cycles from weekly to continuous delivery while maintaining SOC 2 Type II compliance. His team also built Carta's real-time valuation engine, which became one of the company's most differentiated features.

Before Carta, James spent six years at Google, where he was a Staff Engineer on the Cloud AI team. He led the development of several ML infrastructure components that are now part of Vertex AI, and holds two patents related to distributed model training optimization.

At Napkin Deals, James has built a modern, scalable technology stack from the ground up. The platform runs on Next.js and Supabase with pgvector for AI-powered deal matching. He is a strong believer in small, empowered engineering teams and has architected the system for maximum developer velocity. Under his leadership, the platform has achieved 99.95% uptime and sub-200ms response times across all core workflows.