# Ajay Jakate

> Software Engineer

Location: Chicago, Illinois, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/ajayjakate

"He who is tired of Weird Al is tired of life"
- Homer Simpson

## Work Experience
### Staff Software Engineer @ Gusto
Jan 2025 – Present

### Owner / Principal Engineer @ Eridani Consulting
Jan 2023 – Present
I've worked with a few companies providing web design, full-stack software engineering, data engineering, analytics, and product work. Mix of big corp and small office companies.

All of the engineering work is done by me, but I also contract with a few trusted partners specifically on design and analytics. Feel free to drop me a message to say hi!

### Technical Lead @ Equal Experts
Jan 2024 – Jan 2025 | Chicago, Illinois, United States
At Equal Experts I worked with a consulting team to help a satellite radio company re-write and migrate their streaming services to a new platform. In this role, my responsibilities included:

- Writing a web application to aggregate user telemetry events and logging from different sources into a unified session view
- Populating and maintaining a database of aggregated user data using spark, databricks and athena
- Using telemetry data to investigate playback issues and report on occurences

### Software Engineer @ Black Spectacles
Jan 2023 – Jan 2024
Did a rewrite/migration of a 10-year old PHP CMS application into a node/react app. My specific responsibilities included:

- Designing the new database schema and migrating data into it from the old CMS schema
- Handling realtime data updates of learning content and user activity during our migration beta testing phase
- Leading the design of CI pipelines and testing strategies for the new application
- Leading a new analytics strategy for the company

### Director of Data Engineering @ LandscapeHub
Jan 2019 – Jan 2023 | Chicago, IL
I lead a 10-person cross-functional team of developers, analysts, project managers, and operations specialists. I led the design and implementation of the following:

- A pipeline that ingested and standardized inventory and pricing data for over two hundred suppliers
- A machine-learning service (TF-IDF) that transformed user-submitted plant names and sizes into       LandscapeHub's proprietary naming and measurement standard
- Multiple analytics dashboards for sales, leadership, investors, and suppliers

*addendum -- The official title was "director" which was pretty sweet but I was a glorified tech lead at a startup. I did do all that stuff though

### Senior Software Engineer @ LandscapeHub
Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | Chicago, IL
I served as the primary tech lead and mentored a team of five developers. In this role, I:

- worked on general front-end and back-end feature development
- co-led architectural decisions for the platform
- coached junior engineers in best practices and programming skills during pairing sessions
- led infrastructure development, maintenance and monitoring

Lotta rails, react and terraform and trees

### Application Developer @ ThoughtWorks
Jan 2013 – Jan 2017 | Chicago, IL / Atlanta, GA
Please stop endorsing me for "Enterprise Java"

As a developer and consultant, I engaged with 4 major clients across various business and tech domains during my tenure. The teams I worked on:

- Created a web application that managed biotech scientists' workflows and served as a primary database for biological entities using rails, angular, and mongo
- Deployed a java application into a private cloud for a financial client. also maintained and built out the private cloud provisioning technology, using java, angular, and chef
- Migrated the back-end system of a major airline to a new ticketing provider in java/spring
- Built a custom API to manage inventory, pricing, and allocations for a car auction client. Different micro services were in java and ruby


## Education
### Bachelor of Science (BS) in Aerospace, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering
Purdue University
Jan 2008 – Jan 2012


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/ajay-jakate-198a9a84

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Source: https://flows.cv/ajayjakate
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/ajayjakate/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-03-22