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Opinions with production behind them.
Founder, CISO, senior engineer on $400M of fintech. I take on fractional CTO and vCISO work, but the writing is how you'll know whether to call.
Founder
Independent practice since the mid-2010s: websites and web apps for startups, small businesses and nonprofits, then architecture, security and code-audit consulting. Now fractional CTO, vCISO and Chief AI Officer work for AI startups, plus The Distribution Stack.
Founding Engineer
Founding engineer on a multi-sided fuel-logistics marketplace — architecture, backend, and every portal from the ground up on GCP Cloud Run, shipped with an AI-augmented workflow: 4,154 commits in six months.
Chief Information Security Officer (CISO)
Led security as CISO: built the program from zero to SOC 2 Type II and brought it into sales deals, while shipping production AI in Go for 100K+ users and cutting $350K with a cloud migration.
Senior Elixir Engineer
Built high-throughput ingestion for telemetry from 40K+ telematics devices on GCP Kubernetes while modernizing legacy Ruby services.
Senior Backend Engineer
Led identity and authentication for a fintech platform serving 225K+ users and $400M+ in assets, including the migration from AWS Cognito to Auth0.
Senior Backend Engineer
Built analytics and real-time messaging for 450K active students across 900+ universities; led a Ruby-to-Elixir migration that cut service count and cost.
Co-Founder · Engineering Lead
Co-founded and architected the platform from zero. Scaled engineering from 1 to 15+ and shipped alongside product and design through multiple launches.
I'm most effective where product ambition meets operational complexity — modernizing core systems, shipping AI-powered features, and bringing reliability to teams that need to move fast without creating long-term chaos.
Production LLM systems, agentic workflows, retrieval pipelines, and AI-assisted development shipped at pace for real users.
High-throughput services in Go, Elixir, and Ruby with a bias toward clarity, observability, and predictable failure.
Multi-cloud architecture across GCP, AWS, and Azure with Kubernetes, Terraform, and SRE discipline baked in.
Hands-on execution across SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, ISO 27001, IAM, incident response, and vulnerability management.
Worked with
Founder and engineering leader. Founding engineer at EnergyConnect, co-founded PopSocial and scaled engineering from 1 to 15+, led security as CISO at Lavender while still writing production code, and shipped as a senior engineer at BlockFi, InsideTrack, and AAMP Global — building the function from zero and shipping under production load. I bring that judgment to pre-Series-A teams fractionally now.
I've co-founded a startup, scaled an engineering team from one engineer to fifteen, rebuilt core platforms across Ruby, Elixir, and Go, and operated infrastructure across three major clouds. I've been an early adopter of AI-assisted development since 2023 — Claude Code, Copilot, and Codex are core parts of how I work — and I bring that discipline into every team I join.
My sweet spot is pairing operator-level architecture with hands-on delivery. That usually means designing the system, shaping the roadmap with product, and helping the team actually ship it — without leaving behind a trail of operational debt.
Engagements
This site has no database. Here's how a future-dated post stays invisible until its timestamp, and the three places the gate gave the wrong answer anyway.
If robots do the work and nobody earns, who buys? I think the economy dies slowly and the company store fills the gap. That's where I think it goes.
Tax all US output at 100% and it comes to about $95,000 a person a year. Why I doubt UBI arrives, and think robots become the measure of wealth.
Contact
Enterprise deal stuck at the security review, need an AI product delivered, or scaling past your first engineers? Grab a slot on my calendar — or send a message and I'll reply within a couple of days.
Direct: jared@sublimecoding.com
LinkedIn: @jared-smith
Thanks — I read every note personally and will reply within a couple of days.