Her Story
About Jessica
Jessica James serves as the Founding Solutions Engineer at Expander AI, an AI agents-based company in San Francisco, California. In this role, she builds AI agents tailored to various enterprise use cases, such as voice of customer agents, AWS Data Engineering Agents, on-call monitoring agents, and Kubernetes clustering agents. She contributes to product development, tests the platform, provides feedback on features and bugs, and engages with customers to solve their problems. Prior to her current position, James worked in the finance industry at Morgan Stanley Parametric and at Geome, a startup focused on KYC verification. She also spent time at Chicory, an AI startup that shut down after 10 months, where she gained significant experience as an AI developer. Her background includes work as a data engineer, data scientist, and AI developer before transitioning more fully into solutions engineering. James has about 3 years of total experience in her field, including internships and co-ops. She attributes her professional growth to consistency, not giving up in the face of challenges, and the support of her family, boyfriend, and friends. She values patience, listening, honesty, and integrity, and she advises young women entering the industry to experiment with different roles, keep learning, and persist through difficulties.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Jessica
01What do you attribute your success to?
I don't ever give up. Consistency matters so much. I have a very supportive family, a supportive boyfriend, and good friends who genuinely want success for me. I've surrounded myself with that supportive environment. I've been scattered around in many fields and tried different things which helped me discover what I love.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
One major advice I received from my CEO was about staying consistent and not giving up. He drew a graph showing how growth looks stagnant for the first three to four years with no real promotion-level growth, then suddenly hits a peak after five years of staying consistent, not giving up, and waking up every single day no matter what happens. Consistency and recovering fast from failures has helped me grow to where I am today.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Experiment around and try different things. Don't give up. There are hurdles and things to learn, and it's going to be difficult. Keep learning and keep moving forward. Don't stop if your boss isn't good or someone tells you you're not good enough. Anyone can be good enough if they try hard. It might not come instantly; it took about 3 years for me. Along the way you learn a lot.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
Trying different things is not easy. It's not easy to quit and join another company to try something new. Finding out what I could be good at or what I would love to do for the rest of my life was my biggest career challenge. I was in an I-don't-really-know position for a very long time, but discovered it recently after a lot of playing around.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Being patient and listening to others is very important to me. Honesty and integrity matter a lot too. It's important to do what's right, listen, give knowledge, and help out people. It's about transferring knowledge and not being selfish. My CEO is super patient and explains things without frustration, which I value highly.
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