EnergyConnect
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.
Jared Smith
Opinions with production behind them.
Founder, director of security, 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.
- $400M+ fintech assets protected
- 100K+ users on live AI products
- 1 to 15 engineers scaled as co-founder
- EnergyConnect Founding Engineer
- Lavender Director of Information Security
- AAMP Global Senior Elixir Engineer
- BlockFi Senior Backend Engineer
- InsideTrack Senior Backend Engineer
- PopSocial Co-Founder
Recent roles shaped by high-stakes systems and high-trust teams.
Lavender
Director of Information Security · Staff Software Engineer
Shipped production AI features in Go for 100K+ users, ran a multi-cloud migration that cut $350K in spend, and built the security program to SOC 2 Type II.
AAMP Global
Senior Elixir Engineer
Built high-throughput ingestion for telemetry from 40K+ telematics devices on GCP Kubernetes while modernizing legacy Ruby services.
BlockFi
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.
InsideTrack
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.
PopSocial
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.
Technical depth, product momentum, operational calm.
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.
AI Product Engineering
Production LLM systems, agentic workflows, retrieval pipelines, and AI-assisted development shipped at pace for real users.
Backend & Distributed Systems
High-throughput services in Go, Elixir, and Ruby with a bias toward clarity, observability, and predictable failure.
Cloud & Reliability
Multi-cloud architecture across GCP, AWS, and Azure with Kubernetes, Terraform, and SRE discipline baked in.
Security Leadership
Hands-on execution across SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, ISO 27001, IAM, incident response, and vulnerability management.
Worked with
Teams across fintech, edtech, AI, and IoT.
Founder and engineering leader. Founding engineer at EnergyConnect, co-founded PopSocial and scaled engineering from 1 to 15+, ran security and engineering as a director at Lavender 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
- Fractional security & engineering leadership
- Production AI & LLM product delivery
- Cloud platform modernization
- Security & compliance program build-out
Notes, essays, long-form thinking.
Multi-Agent AI Teams Agree Their Way Into Garbage
I set two agent frameworks loose on real work in team-of-agents mode. They agreed their way into the wrong product. The research says exactly why.
I Read Omarchy's AGENTS.md So You Don't Have To
Omarchy's own AGENTS.md, skills, and a design doc reviewed by two other vendors' agents — read from the quattro branch, not the README.
Anthropic's Extreme Scenario Has a Precondition
Anthropic published an economic upside scenario and an alignment risk admission the same week. The upside needs the thing nobody has a plan for.
Contact
Tell me what
you're building.
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
Message received.
Thanks — I read every note personally and will reply within a couple of days.