Technical Founder | Staff Software Engineer
- Location: Chicago, IL
- Email: jesse.w.black@gmail.com
- LinkedIn: jessewblack
- GitHub: jesse-black
Building accessible AI communication products and the secure, reliable systems behind them.
Agentic Engineering & Quality: AI coding agents (Codex, Gemini CLI, Jules), agent skills, quality gates, E2E testing, Dev Containers
Identity & Security: AuthN/AuthZ, OAuth2/OIDC, SSO, IdP, IAM, RBAC
Developer & Agent Tooling: Rust CLI tools, static analysis, Git diff coverage, documentation tooling
Cloud & Eventing: Azure, Terraform, Docker, Podman, event-driven systems (Event Hub/Kafka, Service Bus)
AI & Speech Integrations: OpenAI API (GPT models), Azure Speech (speech recognition)
Ecommerce Integrations: App marketplace, OAuth apps, public developer API, Shopify, WooCommerce
Backend: Distributed systems, REST APIs, C#/.NET, Node.js, SQL Server, Redis
Frontend: TypeScript, React, micro frontends (MFE), Tailwind
Oct 2025 – present
Technical founder building an accessibility-first, AI-powered communication app with agentic engineering.
- Founded and built an accessibility-first communication app for Deaf professionals, combining real-time speech-to-text and text-to-speech.
- Built saved responses and GPT-powered smart replies with one-tap playback, context-aware rewrites, and predictive suggestions.
- Implemented an agentic engineering workflow with AI coding agents, hardened dev sandboxes, and automated quality-gate feedback loops.
- Bootstrapped a secure cloud stack with Terraform, Microsoft Entra External ID, and Azure SQL, optimizing for low burn while designing for scale.
Nov 2022 – Oct 2025
Staff engineer building distributed event-driven shipment services and secure iOS micro frontend integration for fulfillment operations at scale.
- Architected and built a fulfillment center shipment service to track and manage shipping orders.
- Modernized shipping order ingestion using Event Hub (Kafka-compatible) and Service Bus to decouple from the monolith and enable tenantization and sharding.
- Enabled all engineering teams to embed micro frontends (MFE) in the iOS app with secure token transfer to enable seamless single sign-on (SSO).
- Strengthened CI/CD quality gates, adding containerized integration testing (Docker) and local database tests to improve end-to-end reliability.
- Mentored two Senior Software Engineers to Staff level.
Dec 2018 – Nov 2022
Senior engineer leading the IAM overhaul and App Marketplace integrations platform, raising the engineering quality bar with automated gates.
- Served as lead engineer for the IAM and App Marketplace teams, driving architecture, execution, and engineer growth through weekly one-on-ones.
- Led the IAM rebuild using IdentityServer for OAuth2 and OpenID Connect (OIDC).
- Enabled fulfillment center managers to create and manage associate logins directly, eliminating IT-ticket-based provisioning as a scaling bottleneck as ShipBob scaled to hundreds of fulfillment centers.
- Led the new App Marketplace with OAuth 2.0, a public Developer API, and iPaaS integration.
- Delivered 6 App Marketplace integrations, including Walmart and Wix.
- Introduced automated code-quality gates (SonarQube) on the App Marketplace team and enforced minimum 80% test coverage across the team's portfolio, achieving the highest overall test coverage in the engineering organization.
- Drove early adoption of C# 8 nullable reference types across the engineering org.
- Implemented and documented many ShipBob Developer API endpoints, and built the docs system aggregating OpenAPI specs across microservices.
Nov 2015 – Oct 2018
Digital consultancy engineer delivering custom .NET applications for enterprise clients.
- Built custom web and desktop applications for enterprise clients in a fast-paced consulting environment.
- Worked with client stakeholders to define requirements and deliver .NET/SQL Server solutions.
Open-source Rust CLI for Git diff coverage gates in CI and coding-agent workflows.
- Built native coverage parsing across Rust, JavaScript/TypeScript, and .NET to gate pull request diffs without relying on lossy legacy formats.
- Added branch, region, and function diff gates alongside line coverage for more precise enforcement on changed code.
- Built local diff-gate checks for Codex Cloud and Google Jules task environments, shortening feedback loops for agent-driven development.
- Minor in Mathematics
Learn more about how and why this resume is built in ABOUT.md