Clinton James

Applied AI Engineer · Forward Deployed Engineering · AI & Growth Systems

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Summary

Applied AI Engineer with 9+ years of shipping production software across fintech, Web3 and AI. Along the way, I've built multimodal AI tools and the growth systems that bring them to market. I currently run Alubasa Labs, a venture studio where we experiment with solutions to ambitious problems and support founders from day zero, from POC architecture to go-to-market. Our most recent project, Gamavas, is indie gaming infrastructure: a custom agentic harness that turns ideas into playable games, edge-network hosting for web games, and tools for publishing and distribution. In all of this work, I pair engineering depth with product and microeconomic thinking.

Experience

  1. Applied AI Engineer · Gamavas

    Sep 2026 – Present · Remote

    • ›Designed and shipped an AI studio that turns a prompt into a playable three.js game: a tool-calling agent running up to 48 steps per turn across Claude, GPT and Gemini (Trigger.dev, Vercel AI SDK, OpenRouter)
    • ›Made the agent production-grade with per-step cost tracking, token budgets, and recovery from provider outages and rate limits without losing user work
    • ›Turned AI usage into revenue with subscription plans, credit packs and per-step billing; live with real players and payments
    • ›Built the surrounding platform: game hosting on Cloudflare Workers and R2, a Next.js, tRPC and Postgres web app, and a Tauri (Rust) desktop launcher, released staging-first with tests

  2. Full Stack Engineer · Microstart

    Mar 2026 – Present · Remote

    • ›Solo owner of product, architecture, payments and infrastructure for a marketplace to buy and sell SaaS products, from starter codebases to running businesses
    • ›Built multi-vendor listings, admin moderation, offer/counter-offer negotiation and payment flows (Next.js, Node.js, TypeScript, Payload CMS)
    • ›Instrumented conversion and behavioral analytics to measure and improve onboarding

  3. Founder & Lead Architect · Alubasa Labs

    Oct 2024 – Present · Remote

    • ›Embed with founders and non-technical businesses as a fractional technical partner: scope the real bottleneck with stakeholders, then design, build and deploy systems into their operations (CRM, ERP, payments, AI adoption)
    • ›Shipped AI and automation POCs (n8n, Make, LLM APIs) at a 72-hour average turnaround, with an 87% POC-to-pilot conversion rate
    • ›Translated technical systems into business-focused GTM blueprints, shortening B2B sales cycles by ~30%
    • ›Incubate in-house ventures from research to launch, including Microstart and Gamavas

  4. Senior Software Engineer · Neutron Gaming

    Apr 2023 – Jan 2024 · Remote

    • ›Architected a Web3 game launcher with REST APIs and EVM smart contracts; led delivery from design to deployment with cross-functional teams
    • ›Wrote and audited Solidity contracts for secure on-chain asset distribution

  5. Senior Frontend Developer · Seamless Financial

    Mar 2022 – Mar 2023 · Remote

    • ›Built a reusable React component system and merchant payment interfaces for payment links, gateways and bill pay
    • ›Co-led the team's first product analytics on merchant onboarding drop-off, giving product the data behind its conversion work
    • ›Integrated gRPC services with backend teams to improve transaction response times

  6. Software Engineer · AlumUnite

    Apr 2020 – Jan 2022 · Remote

    • ›Led the migration of a legacy PHP CMS to a MERN stack, improving security, maintainability and load speed
    • ›Built donor-to-CRM data pipelines that automated engagement campaigns and repeat-donation follow-ups

  7. Frontend Developer · Minerva Technologies

    May 2019 – Oct 2021 · Remote

    • ›Built Splitxchange, a React digital art marketplace that processed $57,000+ in transactions
    • ›Built React and TypeScript component patterns and Redux state for auctions and multi-step KYC onboarding