JS Jared Smith Founder & Engineering Leader
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Digital Resume

Jared Smith

Founder & Engineering Leader

Founder, CISO and engineering leader with 13+ years building companies, security programs and production AI. Founded Sublime Coding, an independent practice delivering websites and architecture, security and code-audit consulting, now offering fractional CTO, vCISO and Chief AI Officer work to AI startups. Co-founded PopSocial and grew its engineering team from 1 to 15+. As CISO at Lavender, an AI-first startup serving 100K+ users, built the security program from zero to SOC 2 Type II, kicked off ISO 27001, and joined sales on security reviews to close deals, while still writing production code in Go. Hired and mentored engineers across every team led. Currently a founding engineer building a multi-sided energy marketplace from 0 to 1 at EnergyConnect.

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Core competencies

Security & compliance leadership (SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001) Engineering leadership & team building Founder / 0→1 product execution Distributed systems & microservices architecture Production AI & LLM systems AI-assisted development (Claude Code, Copilot, Codex) Backend engineering (Go, Elixir, Ruby) Cloud architecture (GCP, AWS, Azure) API design (REST, gRPC) Site reliability & system performance Infrastructure as code & CI/CD

Experience

Founder

Sublime Coding

2014 — Present

  • Founded an independent practice building websites and web apps for startups, small businesses, and nonprofits, with clients including PopSocial and Everett Taylor (his consultancy Millisense, his personal brand site, and ArtX).
  • Consult on technical architecture, security, and code quality, from architecture reviews to code audits for client teams.
  • Since 2026, offer fractional CTO, vCISO, and Chief AI Officer engagements to AI startups.
  • Build and sell products alongside client work, including The Distribution Stack, a pack of ten Claude Code skills.
  • Write about engineering, security, and production AI at sublimecoding.com, with posts dating back to 2014.

Founding Engineer

EnergyConnect

April 2026 — Present

  • Founding engineer on a multi-sided energy and fuel-logistics SaaS platform — owning architecture, backend, and web portals for every party in the transaction from the ground up.
  • Designing and shipping the platform backend in TypeScript/Node (Express, Prisma/PostgreSQL, Redis/BullMQ) with React portal frontends, deployed on GCP Cloud Run with GitHub Actions CI/CD.
  • Running an AI-augmented development workflow — Claude Code and OpenAI Codex as daily engineering tools — to ship a multi-portal product surface on startup timelines.

Chief Information Security Officer (CISO)

Lavender

February 2023 — March 2026

  • Led security as the company's CISO: built the program from zero, took SOC 2 from Type I to Type II, and kicked off ISO 27001.
  • Ran security engineering hands-on: IAM, MDM, vulnerability management, incident response, and cloud security across GCP, AWS, and Azure.
  • Made security a revenue lever by joining the sales team on customer security reviews, helping close deals.
  • Wrote production code alongside the team: designed and built AI systems and agentic workflows in Go powering core product features for 100K+ users.
  • Led the GCP-to-Azure migration, saving $350K in infrastructure costs over 6 months, and kept multi-cloud production at 99.99% uptime.
  • Standardized Claude Code, Copilot, and Codex across engineering, compressing AI feature delivery by an estimated 40–55%.
  • Mentored engineers and set standards for system design, code review, and observability.

Senior Elixir Engineer

AAMP Global

August 2022 — February 2023

  • Built high-throughput ingestion pipelines processing telemetry from 40K+ telematics devices across large commercial vehicle fleets.
  • Deployed and operated Kubernetes clusters on GCP supporting distributed backend services.
  • Developed new platform features in Elixir while maintaining and gradually migrating legacy Ruby services.

Senior Backend Engineer

BlockFi

June 2020 — July 2022

  • Led migration of authentication infrastructure from AWS Cognito to Auth0 for a fintech platform serving 225K+ users and housing $400M+ in assets — improving reliability and security posture.
  • Designed and implemented fraud-prevention controls and security workflows protecting customer accounts and platform stability at scale.
  • Built internal tooling for user management, identity repair workflows, and operational support — reducing manual support burden by 65%.
  • Designed secure PII storage and handling processes compliant with financial regulatory requirements.
  • Mentored junior engineers and drove architecture decisions across identity and authentication services.

Senior Backend Engineer

InsideTrack

January 2018 — May 2020

  • Built internal analytics platform on Kubernetes processing data for 450K active students across 900+ partner universities.
  • Developed real-time messaging infrastructure supporting coach-to-student communication across a multi-tenant platform.
  • Led Ruby-to-Elixir service migration, improving throughput and reducing memory footprint across high-traffic services.
  • Consolidated microservice footprint from 10 to 6 services, reducing infrastructure cost and operational complexity.

Co-Founder / Engineering Lead

PopSocial

August 2015 — August 2019

  • Co-founded and served as technical lead; designed and built full platform architecture and backend systems from the ground up.
  • Scaled engineering team from 1 to 15+ engineers; established hiring, onboarding, and development workflows.
  • Partnered with product and design to translate roadmap requirements into technical deliverables across multiple product launches.

Senior Software Engineer

One Month

August 2015 — January 2018

  • Led feature development for the onemonth.com online education platform, serving thousands of learners.
  • Designed and implemented A/B testing infrastructure to drive data-informed product decisions; rebuilt the billing system, improving payment reliability.

Senior Software Engineer

Qualaroo

August 2014 — August 2015

  • Led the full rebuild of growthhackers.com in Ruby on Rails, improving performance and maintainability.
  • Managed 12 offshore engineers across multiple countries while driving feature development and code quality.
  • Built and tuned a content trending algorithm used to rank and surface platform content at scale.

Technical skills

Languages

Go · Elixir · Ruby · Python · Node.js · TypeScript · JavaScript

AI & Machine Learning

Production LLM systems · Agentic workflows · Retrieval-Augmented Generation · OpenAI API · Anthropic API · Vector databases · Prompt engineering · Claude Code · GitHub Copilot · OpenAI Codex

Cloud & Infrastructure

Google Cloud Platform · Amazon Web Services · Microsoft Azure · Kubernetes · Docker · Linux · Terraform · Infrastructure as Code

Backend & Systems

Distributed systems · Microservices · REST APIs · gRPC · GraphQL · Event-driven architecture · Message queues · High availability

Data & Reliability

PostgreSQL · MySQL · MongoDB · Redis · Elasticsearch · RabbitMQ · Prometheus · Grafana · Datadog · GitHub Actions

Security & Compliance

SOC 2 Type II · HIPAA · ISO 27001 · IAM · MDM · Vulnerability management · Cloud security · Incident response · PII handling

Frontend

React · TailwindCSS · TypeScript · HTML · CSS