# Jared Smith — Staff Software Engineer

> Staff software engineer and security leader (13+ years) building production AI products, distributed backend systems, and resilient multi-cloud infrastructure. Available for fractional CISO and staff/principal engineering consulting engagements with pre-Series-A AI startups and scaling teams.

Specialties: production LLM systems, agentic AI workflows, distributed systems and observability, cloud cost optimization across GCP / AWS / Azure, SOC 2 / HIPAA / ISO 27001 readiness, and engineering leadership at the small-team-to-fifteen scale.

Writing voice: pragmatic, opinionated, senior — first-person operator essays grounded in real numbers from real roles (Lavender, BlockFi, InsideTrack, AAMP Global, PopSocial). No abstract theorizing, no listicles, no "in theory you could." Every claim ties back to a shipped outcome.

Contact: jared@sublimecoding.com — fractional engagement details at https://sublimecoding.com/consulting

A more detailed version of this file with embedded content bodies is available at https://sublimecoding.com/llms-full.txt — the full text of every flagship essay listed below, concatenated into one ingestion-ready document.

## Key pages

- [Home](https://sublimecoding.com/): Overview of services, credentials, and engagement model
- [Resume](https://sublimecoding.com/resume): Full work history with named outcomes and selected metrics
- [Start Here](https://sublimecoding.com/start): Curated reading paths for founders/CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and senior engineers
- [Writing](https://sublimecoding.com/blog): Long-form essays on AI engineering, security, and engineering leadership
- [Consulting](https://sublimecoding.com/consulting): Fractional security and staff-engineering engagement model
- [Privacy](https://sublimecoding.com/privacy): Cookie, analytics, and data-handling policy
- [Sitemap](https://sublimecoding.com/sitemap.xml): All indexable URLs

## Selected writing — flagship essays

- [AI Won't Shrink Your Team — It'll Expose Why You Needed a Bigger One](https://sublimecoding.com/blog/ai-wont-shrink-your-team): Why AI multipliers don't replace headcount, and what they reveal about the hiring decision you avoided
- [When to Trust an Agent and When to Step In](https://sublimecoding.com/blog/when-to-trust-an-agent-and-when-to-step-in): Four-level autonomy ladder for agentic AI systems and five failure signals that demand human takeover
- [How I Triage a New Codebase in 90 Minutes](https://sublimecoding.com/blog/triage-a-new-codebase-90-minutes): Step-by-step protocol for rapid orientation in unfamiliar code
- [My Daily Agentic AI Workflow](https://sublimecoding.com/blog/my-daily-agentic-ai-workflow): The actual stack — Claude Code, OpenAI Codex — and the loop that makes them ship rather than break things
- [The 'Smallest Possible Slice' Heuristic for Shipping Complex Features](https://sublimecoding.com/blog/smallest-possible-slice-shipping-complex-features): Better than MVP — how to define a slice that ships in days and earns the next slice
- [How to Manage a 4-Person Engineering Team Without Becoming a Manager](https://sublimecoding.com/blog/managing-a-four-person-engineering-team): Rituals, decisions, and the one-on-one cadence that work at small-team scale
- [How I'd Hire a Staff Engineer at an AI Startup](https://sublimecoding.com/blog/how-id-hire-a-staff-engineer-at-an-ai-startup): Sourcing, interview loop, and the failure modes that produce mis-leveled hires
- [The Pre-Series-A AI Startup Hiring Plan: Who to Hire, in What Order, and Why Most Get It Wrong](https://sublimecoding.com/blog/pre-series-a-ai-startup-hiring-plan): Sequenced guide from first engineer to a fifteen-person team
- [The Ruby to Elixir Migration That Cut Our Service Footprint From Ten to Six](https://sublimecoding.com/blog/ruby-to-elixir-migration-ten-to-six-services): Production migration case study — 450K students, 900+ universities, on-call alerts halved
- [Your AI Product Needs a Telemetry Layer Before It Needs a Better Model](https://sublimecoding.com/blog/your-ai-product-needs-telemetry-before-better-model): Observability architecture for LLM systems using LangSmith, Helicone, and custom instrumentation

## Security and compliance

- [How I'd Run Security at an AI-Native Company in 2026](https://sublimecoding.com/blog/running-security-at-an-ai-native-company-2026): Four-layer stack covering prompt injection, agent credentials, secrets handling, and audit logging
- [SOC 2 Is a Revenue Tool, Not a Security Tool](https://sublimecoding.com/blog/soc-2-is-a-revenue-tool-not-a-security-tool): 90-day SOC 2 Type I playbook; total cost $25–45K for a 15-person team
- [vCISO Math for AI Founders: Why 5 Hours a Month Beats a Full-Time Hire](https://sublimecoding.com/blog/vciso-math-for-ai-founders): Cost comparison of full-time CISO ($200–400K) vs. fractional vCISO ($2–4K/month) and when to switch
- [Migrating 225K Users from AWS Cognito to Auth0 Without Forcing a Single Logout](https://sublimecoding.com/blog/aws-cognito-to-auth0-migration-without-forcing-logout): Production identity migration covering hash incompatibility, lazy migration, and MFA token handling
- [How We Cut $350K From Cloud Spend in 6 Months (And What I'd Do Differently)](https://sublimecoding.com/blog/cut-350k-cloud-spend-six-months): Cloud cost reduction case study from Lavender, including contract negotiation breakdown

## Engineering leadership

- [From One Engineer to Fifteen: What Co-Founding Taught Me About Engineering Leadership](https://sublimecoding.com/blog/from-one-engineer-to-fifteen-engineering-leadership): Hiring, rituals, and the leverage of culture in early-stage scaling
- [AI-Assisted Engineering Isn't Faster Coding. It's a New Workflow.](https://sublimecoding.com/blog/ai-assisted-engineering-is-a-new-workflow): How AI changes review, decomposition, and what "shipping" actually means

## Topic indexes

- [AI / Agents tag](https://sublimecoding.com/blog/tag/ai): Posts on production LLM systems, agent orchestration, and AI-assisted engineering workflow
- [Security tag](https://sublimecoding.com/blog/tag/security): Posts on SOC 2, vCISO economics, identity migrations, and AI security
- [Engineering leadership tag](https://sublimecoding.com/blog/tag/engineering-leadership): Posts on hiring, scaling teams, and operating as a senior IC
- [Founders tag](https://sublimecoding.com/blog/tag/founders): Posts written specifically for pre-Series-A founder/CTO readers

## Optional

- [Full archive](https://sublimecoding.com/blog): All 50 posts. Posts dated 2014–2017 cover Ruby, Rails, ColdFusion, system administration, and earlier Phoenix migration mechanics. Kept for historical interest; may not reflect current opinions.