# Jess Leigh Unrein > Software Engineer and Writer Location: Greater Chicago Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/jess Connecting people and being involved in the way that we communicate, innovate, and learn together has always been a passion of mine. I started my career in nonprofits, with a focus on children's literacy and education. While my time with United Way and Colorado Reading Corps was an amazing experience, I realized that my interest and talent for working with people is best utilized through technology, and creating beautiful and meaningful tools that bring people together. I'm a graduate of Dev Bootcamp Chicago, and I have a bachelors in Political Science with a minor in Music from Knox College. ## Work Experience ### Staff Software Engineer @ Braven Jan 2023 – Present | Chicago ### Senior Software Engineer @ Tenet Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 - Lead developer on credit policy updates and changes. Implemented new credit policy variations that were responsible for 30% of new incoming loan volume after launch. - Weekly office hours mentoring junior employees - Significant work on improving documentation, process, and onboarding in a young, high-growth startup environment ### Senior Software Engineer, Data Science and Analtyics Lab @ American Family Insurance Jan 2020 – Jan 2022 | Chicago, Illinois, United States Tech lead for the new auto telematics lab team, responsibilites including: - Led team of developers to execute data pipelining and application development related to large scale auto telematics data - Designed and created API for interfacing with auto telematics data at production scale - Created integration and execution plan for telematics lab api with existing enterprise systems - Designed system for productionalizing and administering data science models relating to usage based auto insurance - Hiring and onboarding to staff up new engineering team - Creating team processes and acting as scrum master until we were able to hire a dedicated program manager - Coordinated across enterprise teams to gather requirements, break down technical tasks, and develop timelines and roadmaps Other responsibilities - Debugged and managed a large data release for our property data tracker - Designed and implemented data pipelines to gather over one billion images from MLS providers into our central data store - Designed data storage, metadata storage, and API for our property data tracker to correlate images from multiple vendors and dates to unique addresses ### Senior Software Engineer @ Benchmark Analytics Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 | Greater Chicago Area As one of the original onshore engineering hires at Benchmark Analytics, I had a hand in a lot of initial engineering decisions in untangling and restructuring a monolithic codebase inherited from offshore developers. Some of my accomplishments while at Benchmark include: - Led Security and Permissions Team effort to break up monolithic Loopback codebase into Springboot microservice - Standardized application permissions into RBAC format - Implemented Oauth2 authentication and authorization for all code bases - Developed Gitlab CI/CD pipelines and code coverage checks for all code bases - Built a process for managing resources in AWS GovCloud using Terraform - Managed a small mixed team of remote and on site engineers - Introduced retrospectives and gathered feedback on team processes from on site and offshore engineers - Mentored junior employees and acted as a liaison between engineering and product - Created a logging and audit trail plan for critical customer data - Built a Flask skeleton with dummy endpoints to serve as a template for future Python microservices - Engaged in technical planning and subject matter expertise advising for new workflow and notification services to be written in Flask ### Data Engineer @ ActiveCampaign Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | Greater Chicago Area I work closely with the site reliability engineering, database administration, and data science teams, helping to close the operational gap between the two. I also collaborate with business intelligence and operations to implement ETL processes that power custom reporting and analytics. Primary technologies used: Python 3.6.5, Apache Airflow, Terraform, AWS Aurora RDS, AWS S3, AWS Lambda, MySQL 5.6 ActiveCampaign is an integrated marketing automation, email marketing, and automated sales CRM platform. As one of the fastest growing tech companies in Chicago, ActiveCampaign is revolutionizing marketing automation. Our software allows all of our users the power to make smarter business decisions based on data-driven analytics. ### Software Engineer @ Sprout Social, Inc. Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 | Chicago, IL Worked on platform side application development for both the main Django api layer and associated Java 8 microservices. Primary technologies used: Python 2.7.10, Django, Java 8, Dropwizard, Cassandra, MySQL 5.5, nsq Sprout Social is a leading company in the social media management space based in Chicago. Sprout integrates with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google+, and developers became very familiar with interfacing with social media focused public apis. ### Software Engineer @ Shiftgig Jan 2014 – Jan 2016 | Chicago, IL Shiftgig is an on-demand labor marketplace that uses technology to connect businesses and workers for short-term engagements. Responsibilities and accomplishments: ‐ Created custom Python logger and defined logging style and standards for back end services ‐ Designed Python abstraction to create an employee reliability score based on data science algorithm ‐ Set up back end capabilities for push notifications via AWS boto library and SNS. Created a notifications control panel for users in the main Flask application. ‐ Designed a Flask micro‐service to handle location geocoding and timezone information ‐ Wrote comprehensive unit and integration tests for our main Flask application and location micro‐service ‐ User support and debugging for the ondemand labor marketplace Primary technologies used: Python 2.7.10, Python 3, Flask, sqlalchemy, postgres, mongodb, AWS simple notification service, postgis, ansible, docker ### Web Development Student @ Dev Bootcamp Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | Chicago, Il Spent 9 weeks in an intense, immersive program, studying Ruby on Rails, SQL, jQuery, Javascript, AJAX, TDD with rSpec and Jasmine, OOP in the context of Ruby and Javascript, HTML5, CSS3, and API integration. This was preceded by a 12-week phase of learning more basic skills focused predominantly on problem solving in Ruby to learn the ins and outs of the language. In addition to building basic fluency in Ruby and Javascript, I spent significant time collaborating in pairs and small groups to complete both daily challenges and larger scale apps. We worked on skills such as remote pairing, github workflow, version control, driving development with user stories, wireframing, and database modeling. This experience culminated in co-leading a final project to create an app in just 8 days. My team of five created trUism, an app that analyzes the social media output of universities to build a cultural profile. This was an excellent test of all of the skills I had accumulated over the course of the program in addition to applying what I learned to expand my repertoire of technologies. Co-leading a final project also helped to exercise the soft skills necessary to encourage a productive team environment. trUism - https://github.com/devdame/DBC-final-project ### Colorado Reading Corps AmeriCorps VISTA @ Mile High United Way Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 | Denver, CO Team Building and Leadership -Developed member management policies regarding professionalism and workplace behavior -Held webinar for peers on social media as a professional networking tool -Planned professional development, team building, and community service projects for Colorado Reading Corps members -Assisted members in finding additional community service opportunities Data Management and Technical Support -Provided support to Colorado Reading Corps members for everything from email access to utilizing online data warehouses -Helped maintain data fidelity in two separate data storage systems Recruitment and Volunteer Management -Organized over 75 volunteers for United Way's 2012 Women's Leadership Luncheon -Maintained Twitter, Wordpress, and Facebook for Colorado Reading Corps -Created social media marketing plan for Colorado Reading Corps -Drafted social media standards and policies for Reading Corps members -Successfully hired 50 Reading Corps members for the second program year Hiring responsibilities included: -Marketing application -Screen applications -Conducting over 80 interviews ## Education ### Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in Political Science Knox College Jan 2008 – Jan 2011 ### Bootcamp Graduation in Web Development Dev Bootcamp Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 ### High School Diploma in High School Cirriculum Cherry Creek High School Jan 2004 – Jan 2008 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jessunrein - Website: http://jessunrein.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/jess JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/jess/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22