About

James Yarbrough

Builder & Operator

I'm James Yarbrough, though nearly everyone calls me Jamey. I build products and I run the operations behind them. Sometimes that means writing the code myself, sometimes it means leading the team, owning the roadmap, and answering for the P&L. I've spent my career doing both, and the combination is the point.

My path here wasn't a straight line. I studied political science at The Citadel, moved to Croatia more than thirteen years ago, and built an English-language school from nothing into a real business with staff, brand partnerships, and over a hundred students. Running that company taught me the parts of building that never show up in a code review: hiring, P&L, vendor deals, and knowing which problem is actually worth solving. Then I taught myself to engineer, earned an MS in Data Science, and spent five years contracted with Duolingo building data and AI systems behind a global operation.

At Duolingo I led a cross-functional team of 19 across the Asia-Pacific region before moving into data analytics and engineering, where I became the sole engineer behind an analytics platform that ran an entire proctoring operation: financial systems moving over $2M a year in contractor payments, LLM-powered reporting, and a data warehouse that unified half a dozen external sources into a single source of truth. I value both sides of that experience. I can lead the team and run the operation, and I can build the system it depends on.

Today I build and operate two flagship SaaS products end to end, by myself, owning everything from architecture to go-to-market. Petica is a live Croatian EdTech platform that connects to the national school system and uses AI to help families support their kids' learning. Sitnice Bitnice is a bilingual content platform I rebuilt from a legacy site. Both run in production, both were designed, built, and operated by one person, and both run on a deliberately tight budget, because I care as much about the business behind a product as the code inside it.

I'm a US citizen and an EU long-term resident, authorized to work in both without sponsorship, currently based in Zagreb and open to relocating to the Charlotte area. I'm open to engineering, product, and leadership roles, anywhere someone who can take a product from idea to production and run the operation around it actually moves the needle. If that's you, get in touch.