jakejacobson.info

career

Fourteen years, one through-line

The professional part. I’m a senior software engineer. The last fourteen years have been one company; the three before that were technical support. Nothing exotic — and I’d argue that’s exactly why the last decade was good: same place, same machines, every failure mode visible from both sides.

2009 – 2012UK2 Group — technical support supervisorShared web hosting, tier 1/2, Logan UT. Where I learned the one rule this whole career runs on: if you do it twice, automate it.
2012 – presentMasterControl — software engineer → senior (L3)Fourteen years, one company. Document & records SaaS in a regulated space (FDA, GxP). Long enough at one place to see systems fail, get rebuilt, and fail differently.
~2012Utah State University — BS, Management Information SystemsThe degree that was supposed to be a shortcut into management. It was, actually — a shortcut into understanding why the machines are where they are.

now

What I actually do

The delivery pipeline

The end-to-end pipeline that ships the product: Jenkins and Groovy at scale, running against multi-account, multi-region AWS. When it's boring, I'm doing it right.

Onboarding automation

New environments used to take 8–12 hours of careful hand-holding. Now it's under an hour, and it doesn't need me. That delta is the job, really.

The on-call machinery

Alerting, runbooks, and the dashboards that answer 'is it the network or the app' before 7 a.m. Regulated-industry discipline: everything reproducible, everything documented, nothing 'it worked on my machine'.

lately

Deep in

  • AWS multi-account + CloudFormation
  • Terraform
  • Jenkins / Groovy at scale
  • Windows automation (pywinrm)
  • Kubernetes
  • Postgres
  • on-call runbooks
  • local LLM tooling — the part with its own page

not here

What this page is not

This page describes what I do, not what I’m looking for. No open roles, no comp talk, no résumé, no “excited to connect” energy. If you’ve worked with me and something above needs a name changed before it’s public, message me on GitHub — it’s in the footer.