James Kendrick

Summary

I am currently seeking Fall 2026 off-cycle internship/co-op opportunities in software engineering.

I gravitate toward software engineering at the backend and platform layer that other engineers build on top of. What excites me most is designing scalable, intuitive infrastructure in the form of internal developer tooling and novel abstractions that compress complexity into clean, composable APIs. At Meta, this meant building a configuration-driven pipeline generator that let Data Scientists onboard new metric funnels in minutes instead of days, the goal being to encode domain expertise into an abstraction expressive enough that boilerplate simply ceases to exist. That same instinct shows up in tools like Dirvana, where I mapped navigation behavior into a small, self-contained object model that quietly learns from you. I think deeply about object-oriented design, not as a methodology to follow, but as a way of finding the natural seams in a problem and giving them first-class representation in code. The best, most satisfying systems I've worked on feel inevitable in hindsight, where each piece is extensible, each interface is obvious, and each abstraction earns its value.

I'm from San Antonio, Texas, and grew up loving mathematics. My love for math originally stemmed from the deep satisfaction of building an intuitive understanding of a concept and then mapping a complex problem onto it. This led me to start off my academic career as a math major, but when I discovered programming during my first year at UIUC, I realized the problem-solving process was identical, but with an incredible addition: creative freedom. Instead of being bound by existing mathematical rules, object-oriented programming allows me to invent my own constructs. CS took the analytical reasoning I loved in math and turned it into a sort of art form, allowing me to design elegant, custom tools that perfectly mirror my thought process.

When I'm not coding, I like to stay active. I played baseball my entire life through high school, so to scratch that athletic itch, I've now channeled that energy more disparately into weightlifting, tennis, disc golf, basketball, backpacking, rock climbing, and dodgeball. Of those, I think going on long, overnight backpacking trips and enjoying nature with friends is my favorite. Packing up a week's worth of food and gear and then heading out into the Yosemite wilderness to scramble up some sketchy peaks or take a dip in some frigid alpine lakes is my idea of a perfect, relaxing vacation. I also love playing co-op video games with friends, finding new music to listen to, trying new restaurants and cafes, and spending time with my family and friends. Oh, and if it wasn't obvious by my Court Vision project and being a San Antonio native, I'm a huge fantasy basketball and Spurs fan — Go Spurs Go!