James Heaney

Blog

I am 2x exited founder, engineer, and the CTO of Grade.

I made my first dollar online at 9 building WordPress sites, and I sold my first startup at 22 securing distributed systems.

Now, I am obsessed with the future of work, global payouts, and how to power the wave of working AI agents.

Experience

Software Mechanical

Grade, June 2025-Present Cofounder and CTO.

Grade is the API for performance-based payroll. Think of us like Deel or Gusto, but our payouts are for work completed, not hours. Companies use Grade to pay contractors and AI agents based on results: tasks completed, targets hit, work delivered. We handle compliance, tax reporting, and global payouts.

Founders Inc August 2024-June 2025 I was part of the Founders Inc team, tasked with building revenue generating apps to cover operated costs. During my time there, I built and launched Pray Screen, which was a religious screen time app. We grew it to $40K MRR in just 2 months, it was downloaded over 250,000 times, and we later sold the app. Consumer Apps

Building Consumer Social Apps Lecture, January 2024 Recorded a lecture at Toronto Metropolitan University talking about building consumer social apps from the ground up, going over the psychology, motivation, demographics, philosophy, and technology needed to achieve a viable consumer social app.

You can see the lecture slides, notes, and watch the video here. Consumer Social Apps, Consumer Philosophy, Architecture Design, Founder Tips

NLP and ML Model Platform Integration, August 2022-December 2022 Designed and integrated natural language processing transformers like OpenAI's GPT-3 and Whisper, EleutherAI's GPTJ, and Facebook's BART zero-shot classifier into production systems. System design includes asynchronous processing of jobs with Apache Kafka, GPU-accelerated workloads, and a microservice architecture spanning over multiple datacentres. Spring-Boot, PyTorch, React, Apache Kafka, PostgreSQL, Neo4J, FreeBSD, Ubuntu

Mechanical Engineering Degree, April 2022 I completed my Mechanical Engineering degree at Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada. My discipline focuses were on material science and manufacturing, with which I wrote my material science thesis on the viability of 3D-printed polystyrene in the packing industry, and my final engineering capstone on the design and fabrication of fully customizable 3D-printable accessible footwear for hospitals and long-term care facilities. Material Science, Manufacturing Optimization, Design for Manufacturing, Human-Centric Design

3D Printable Accessible Footwear, January 2022-April 2022 Inspired by my time at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, my team and I set out to design footwear that was 3D-printable, accessible, and offered comfort to geriatric patients in hospitals and LTC facilities. We successfully created a fully parametric design that allowed for on-the-fly adjustments to be made based on three principal measurements of the patient's foot. This allowed us to design a system that creates shoes made perfectly for patients, simplifying the technology to just three inputs, and using off-the-shelf printers and cloth-like filaments. Material Science, Rapid Prototyping, 2D/3D Design, Human-Centric Design

Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, June 2019-January 2022 I worked as one of the key software engineers at Sunnybrook's patient record distribution network, MyChart. Our work involved hospitals across Canada and the United States, and connected over 1 million patients with their medical records securely online. My main focuses were system architecture design, full-stack development, platform security, and working with our partners. I engineered the existing solution to retrofit our old Adobe ColdFusion codebase with modern technologies using stateless security and encrypted web tokens, laying the groundwork for the team's expansion into Angular, React, and mobile apps. Angular, React, iOS, Android, Spring, ASP.NET, Adobe ColdFusion, Microsoft SharePoint, MySQL, MSSQL

Hybrid Rocket Engine, August 2021 Designed and engineered a hybrid rocket engine from the ground up, doing the machining and chemistry in my garage. The rocket successfully lit on the first ignition, and was my first venture into rocketry, a space I would like to further explore. Organic Chemistry, Combustion Physics, Stress Analysis, Material Science, 2D Design

FindMyVax, May 2021-July 2021 Designed and engineered a platform that helped over 55,000 Canadians find COVID-19 vaccines available near them. It was initially difficult to find COVID-19 vaccines in Ontario, with the government opting for a "free-for-all" approach to distribution; there were multiple vendors all with different systems and without a central way of booking appointments. My partner and I developed a system that reverse engineered each vendor's platform, aggregated the data, and displayed it on an easy-to-use dashboard with email notifications. We eventually expanded to all of Canada, including each and every province and territory into our system. Python, PHP, HTML/CSS/JS, Spring-Boot, Apache Kafka, PostgreSQL

RU Mine, February 2020-May 2022 Dating app turned social media, RU Mine was our social app for Ryerson University that started as a joke between friends and later became a platform that captured over 5000 users, nearly 20% of the student population. Originally launching in February 2020 with a Valentine's Day matchmaker, then a full blown dating app just a month later, RU Mine evolved over the course of COVID-19 to become a platform connecting students with a friend finder, class groups, group chats, and the original dating app. We were able to launch merchandise, a small student-run media publication, and become a name still known today despite active development stopping February 2021. Python, PHP, HTML/CSS/JS, React, React-Native, iOS, Android, Spring-Boot, Apache Kafka, PostgreSQL, Neo4J

ClassApp, December 2018-Present Developed full software solutions to problems teachers were having within schools managing students, announcements, extra-curriculars, and communication. Many products have been launched over the years, the most recent two being actively used in school boards today: our Student Relationship Management software, and secure messaging platform. HTML/CSS/JS, PHP, Spring-Boot, PostgreSQL