# Jesper Hodge

> Lead Engineer & Technical Founder | 8+ yrs Full-stack | Building MVPs, scaling systems, and aligning engineering with business outcomes

Location: Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/jesper

Technical founder and senior full-stack engineer with 8+ years of experience architecting and scaling products across startups and high-traffic platforms. Proven track record as a hands-on tech lead delivering MVPs, driving revenue growth, and mentoring teams. Skilled in React, JavaScript, Python, Node, and cloud-native architectures. Equally comfortable building systems from scratch or improving performance at scale. Ready to take ownership as a lead engineer in a growing startup, bridging product, engineering, and business impact.

## Work Experience
### Senior UX Engineer @ Unicon, Inc.
Jan 2026 – Present

### Senior Software Engineer, Course Authoring @ 2U
Jan 2022 – Jan 2025 | Boston, Massachusetts, United States
- As lead developer, interfaced with partners and stakeholders and designed, implemented, and delivered a solution to integrate a partner's courses via SCORM Connect, which resulted in projected 300k-500k yearly revenue
- I "Informally stepped into the role of team technical lead", quoting my manager
- Designed, implemented, and rolled out a course authoring API for edx.org (https://studio.edx.org/authoring-api/ui/) that allows automatic creation of courses which increases revenue
- Senior Engineer responsibilities in the team responsible for course authoring at edx
- Development of features for edx.org, an e-learning platform with 40 million users, one of the top 1000 websites worldwide (https://learnopoly.com/edx-statistics/)
- Open-source maintainership and feature development within OpenEdx, a massive community (GitHub.com/openedx) powering thousands of education sites worldwide
- On-call incident response

### Co-founder and CTO @ Contempla Meditation
Jan 2024 – Jan 2024 | Boston, Massachusetts, United States
- Led a team of engineers and content specialists to deliver an MVP to their first clients
- Planned and built an MVP on the tech and business side
- Created a business strategy that identified a target audience and persona and crafted an MVP that provided a solution to their market needs

### Fullstack JavaScript Developer @ Mediengruppe RTL Deutschland
Jan 2021 – Jan 2022
Software Engineer for RTL News / rtl.de, a major German news platform with 200k-2M page visits per day.
- Created new Video Playlist feature that increased performance over previous tool
- Designed and implemented a Persistence / Cache storage layer for articles in MongoDB that significantly improved page performance, which increased page visits and thus revenue
- Implemented a range of frontend performance, Core Web Vitals, and SEO improvements that increased page visits and revenue
- Implemented new features for RTL.de that allowed us to reduce dependence on third party tools which lowered operating costs

### Consultant (Full-stack JavaScript developer) @ Scheer PAS
Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 | Saarbrücken, Saarland, Germany
- Tech consultant on the company's largest client project, a vendor portal, for a major international retail chain
- As a React expert, led the migration of the whole project from jQuery to React
- Proposed, designed, and implemented a React component library for the project that fully solved the migration problems and client complaints the team was previously facing
- Created a complex data table component that allows cell editing, versioning, commenting and revising
- Lead developer for a team of 3 over 2 months to adjust the vendor portal to the Asian market; drove work from client requirements to design and implementation, succeeded to client's satisfaction and finished earlier than planned
- Mentored the whole team in React, git processes, and Agile
- Proposed and shifted team to a hybrid SCRUM approach that replaced the earlier waterfall workflow and solved some significant issues in team efficiency

### Software Developer @ Instaffo
Jan 2017 – Jan 2020
- Developed and implemented major backend and frontend features for a large job matching platform
- Gathered Startup experience through working in a small team on big features
- Took on rapidly shifting responsibilities on different projects as needed.
- Implemented a pixel-perfect marketing landing page
- Mentored several junior developers
- Frontend code owner and reviewer
- Responsibility as main maintainer of a custom-built Marketing Lead Automation application
- Implemented authorization and authentication for above application
- Implemented a role-based permission system for above application


## Education
### Bachelor of Arts - BA in English Language and Literature, General
Heidelberg University


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jesper-hodge

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Source: https://flows.cv/jesper
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/jesper/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-03-28