Jacob Romer

Consulting practice developing software for organizations as an independent developer, working directly with non-technical stakeholders or on cross-functional product teams. Selected projects:

• Practice Better (Q3 2023-Q1 2024): Rearchitected CI/CD infrastructure, achieving 10x faster builds through test parallelization, strategic caching, and code optimization. Reduced average build times from 45 to 4 minutes.
• HelpKitchen (Q2-Q3 2022): Launched an MVP of a humanitarian aid platform in less than 2 months using Ruby on Rails, enabling restaurants to serve 10K+ free meals to food-insecure families. Engineered multiple role-based workflows, a real-time matching engine, async job processing, and a CI/CD pipeline using AWS.
• Within3 (Q3 2021-Q1 2022): Modernized a legacy ETL pipeline via containerization, reducing deployment time by 60%. Designed and built a custom tracing system using Ruby metaprogramming, cutting typical debugging time from hours to minutes.
• Petco (Q1-Q4 2018): Built an ETL pipeline processing 100M+ records across distributed SQL databases using Python, Pandas, and Jenkins. Used parallelization and iterative benchmarking to satisfy tight SLAs, enabling the successful launch of Petco’s first online booking platform.
• Shape Analytics (Q4 2017): Architected scalable backend infrastructure using Django, NumPy, and AWS, productionizing a prototype analytics application developed by data scientists, ensuring a successful subsequent acquisition.

• Secured the core Ruby on Rails application against malicious actors by enabling 2FA enforcement for member accounts and making org memberships capable of being restored, automating a prohibitively costly process for 1.7M organizations.
• Secured the GitHub Enterprise Management Console (Ruby, Sinatra) against brute-force password attacks by adding rate-limiting to authentication requests.

Led end-to-end development of features including a financial analytics dashboard (React/D3.js) and core platform services (Rails/JavaScript), delivering $20K annual savings through automated reporting while implementing SMS notifications, recommendation engine integration, and CI/CD pipeline configuration.