James Vaughn

I turn AI from a cost center into a technical moat.

Chief Technology Officer, Alterion AI

TL;DR

I align technical infrastructure with business goals. I turn trad eng orgs into AI-centric teams that ship products faster.

Why me…

Late stage startups need to scale products without losing momentum. Fast growing public companies face the same challenge. I bring over 25 years of experience solving this. I led engineering and product teams at Splunk, Workday, and Cognizant. As CTO at Alterion, I am currently shepherding a fast moving engineering team while scaling up the forward deployed engineering posture of our customer onboarding and success organization. I understand the code. I understand the growth strategy. I understand how to operationalize it. I understand complex organizations.

Companies often struggle to turn prototypes into scalable products. This gap stalls growth. You need a leader who connects complex engineering with clear business strategy. Without this bridge you risk shipping products nobody wants. You risk losing market share to faster competitors.

I fix stalled product pipelines. I take ownership of engineering velocity to help you capture new markets.

I am accountable…

You will know I’ve done my job when your release cycles shorten, quality improves, team performance improves, and customers feel the difference. Success means we ship your next generation roadmap features within days not weeks or months. It means your engineering teams drive continuous innovation instead of managing technical debt.

Experience

Alterion AIChief Technology Officer

2026 to Present · Remote

  • First technical hire, reporting directly to the founders
  • Ran the full 30/60/90-day mandate: audited the codebase and AWS footprint with Snyk, SonarQube, and Trivy
  • Replaced an all-manual deploy process with a GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline
  • Instrumented DORA metrics as the team's first quantified velocity baseline, with Datadog dashboards behind it
  • Ran build-vs-buy-vs-fine-tune evaluations across the AI use cases central to the product, producing a demo-ready prototype used in investor conversations ahead of the company's Series A
  • Deployed Vanta for the company's first SOC 2 gap analysis and authored its first security and operational policy set
  • Built the technical hiring function from zero: role scorecards, a structured interview loop, first engineering offer inside 60 days

Splunk / CiscoVP, Product Experience & AI

2023 to 2025 · San Jose, CA

  • Architected a Tier-1 development partnership with OpenAI to co-develop the Codex model
  • Deployed five Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that became the data-connectivity layer behind the platform's premium AI subscription tiers
  • Led the AI-native Figma plugin suite that collapsed the design-to-development bottleneck and cut feature time-to-market by 40%
  • Shipped agentic AI products across the Observability line, including troubleshooting agents, agent monitoring, a triage agent, a malware reversal agent, and AI playbook authoring
  • Shipped AI-powered federated search across Snowflake, AWS, and Azure, and an AI-native SIEM workflow unifying threat detection, investigation, and response

WorkdayVP Engineering, CX Apps

2020 to 2023 · Pleasanton, CA

  • Led a global organization of 150+ people across engineering, product management, and customer experience
  • Full ownership of 27 customer-facing and internal applications
  • Architected a digital self-service strategy that cut support case volume enough to save $8M a year in operating costs
  • Shipped an AI chatbot that handled 40% of first-touch customer inquiries
  • Pushed CI/CD and agile practices to 50+ releases a week, running a 24x7 follow-the-sun operation across the US, Ireland, and India

Cognizant SoftvisionVP Engineering

2017 to 2020 · San Francisco, CA

HoneywellVP Product, Cloud & Software

2015 to 2017 · San Jose, CA

Patents

  • Patent application: AI assistant for visualizations and dashboards
  • Patent application: network topology providing a seamless transition between levels

Also built

  • ClaimAppeal.ai · 2026

    Technical Co-founder, Pre-seed

  • PayorTransparency.com · 2026

    Technical Co-founder, Pre-seed

  • Co-location data center · 2016

    Built and sold

  • Ecommerce business · 2012

    Grew to $2.6M TTM, sold at a 2x multiple

  • SMS B2B protocol platform · 2010

    Founder, $850K seed

  • Business process automation · 2008

    Co-founder, $320K ARR