James’Carlton Wallace

James Richards has extensive experience in engineering and technology leadership, currently serving as CTO at Udacity since May 2016, where James has held various titles including VP of Engineering and Director of Engineering. Prior to Udacity, James worked at Nest Labs as a Manager and spent nearly nine years at LinkedIn, initially as a Senior Engineering Manager and later as an Engineering Manager and Senior Software Engineer, focusing on features such as Groups and Member Profiles. James began a career in software engineering at DemandTec and E Patterns, and made an early start at IBM, developing systems and applications with J2EE technologies. James holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from UC Santa Barbara, earned in 1999.