Building Systems.
In Silicon, Sunlight,
and Sonnets.

James Takyi is a senior network engineer at The Cigna Group with more than 13 years of experience across regulated healthcare, public-sector, and multi-site data center environments. He pairs Cisco routing, switching, SD-WAN, and network security work with production software development, and is the founder of five SaaS platforms and the author of the poetry collection The Moon Rises with Light.

Enterprise network engineering — Cisco SD-WAN and Viptela, Meraki, Nexus, ACI, and Catalyst Center, with BGP, OSPF, and EIGRP routing — alongside network security across Palo Alto, Cisco ISE and NAC, DUO, Umbrella, 802.1x, and VPN. He also builds the software around that infrastructure: Python automation with Netmiko, Paramiko, and Ansible, and production services with automated test suites, CI/CD pipelines, and observability.

BOM Builder is an internal network delivery platform James built at The Cigna Group as sole product owner and engineer. It replaced a fragile multi-sheet Excel bill-of-materials process with a web application where engineers select a site type, enter quantities, and a rules engine propagates licensing and maintenance lines automatically. It cut a standard site build from three to four hours down to under an hour.

Yomigo AI is a B2B voice AI platform that handles inbound and outbound business calls 24/7. It runs a containerized Python voice-agent worker on Google Cloud Run alongside a TypeScript API tier, with SIP telephony, automated test suites, GitHub Actions CI/CD, error monitoring, and fail-closed secret management.

Five: WeCandid, a transparent lending marketplace; WedRequest, a marketplace connecting couples with wedding vendors through competitive bidding; Yomigo AI, voice AI for business calls; Tupoyo, a Stack Overflow for prompts; and CarniFete, a carnival operations platform adopted by the Virginia Carnival in 2026.

He uses Claude Code and Codex daily to accelerate development, refactoring, troubleshooting, testing, and documentation, while keeping engineering controls in front of generated code. In practice that means automated test and typecheck gates in CI, code review, fail-closed configuration when a required secret is missing, and safe-degradation paths so a failing dependency never takes a service down silently.

The Tank That Texts Me, an MIT-licensed home heating-oil monitor built on an ESP32 and an XKC-Y25-V non-contact capacitive sensor. It watches the tank through the glass and sends a Telegram alert when the level drops, then nudges hourly until it is refilled. The source and build notes are on GitHub at github.com/jtakyi88.

CCNP Security, CCNA, Cisco Identity Management, AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate, Harvard CS50x, CompTIA Network+, and CompTIA A+. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology from Western New England University.

By email at jtakyi88@gmail.com or through LinkedIn. His open-source work is published on GitHub at github.com/jtakyi88, and his writing and podcast are on YouTube.